I know there’s no such thing as a pillared hardtop. Except that’s what Ford called it in their brochure and like wildfire the term caught on and now it’s used from Toledo to Tokyo, Modesto to Munich, and perhaps even Cairo to…Cairo, IL. So it’s a real term since Ford, America’s premier truck-maker, used it in print first.
And here it is, folks, Ford’s Personal Entry-Level-Luxury Coupe for 1977, the LTD 2-Door Pillared Hardtop. More limited in panache than the Thunderbird, and Less Than Daring in appearance compared to a Lincoln Mark V. Or maybe not. If you squint hard enough they all look kind of the same, except the LTD leaves you with enough change in your pocket to maybe try to impress a streetwalker by flashing your cash. ‘Coz the badge on the car ain’t going to do it by itself, ya feel me? And just like that streetwalker’s gonna pocket your cash up front, I’m not showin’ you the pillared hardtop goods till you click through…No free rides, that’s Hollywood Boulevard 101!
I don’t profess to actually “love” the 1970s barges, but after a few moments of serious reflection while straining in the can this morning, I do prefer them to most of the 1950s vehicles that were birthed in Detroit. Maybe because you could still daily one, not really so much with most 50s stuff. And maybe I could “love” one in that way someone sometimes can “love” something at the end of a long night of, uh, fun. Sure, they’re excessive, but they revel in that excess. They roll around in it. They represent a bygone era of gluttony, exuberance, extravagance, and probably bags of cocaine; to wit, if Studio 54 had a showroom in the back behind the bathrooms surely there’d have been a plethora of Personal Luxury Coupes on display.
Donna Summer would be in the back of one, Rick James beside her, Keith Haring up front defacing the dashboard with a marker, and probably Ian Shrager himself in the driver’s seat, wheeling around and heading straight to hell (although he is still very much with us) with lines of Bolivian marching powder all across the dashboard like the world’s longest crosswalk. And this particular car was built just in time to be there at the grand opening of that club! Sure, when mid-morning rolls around after that night and the sun hits you through the blinds and you have that panicked thought about what have you done right before looking over towards the other pillow and seeing exactly what you have done, well, you seemed to enjoy yourself while the sun was still on the other side of the orb, you little mothereffer… You play, you pay, as Mama used to say!
But there’s an issue. I know they’re supposed to have been cool, the thing to drive, but change was in the air and JPC’s dad couldn’t be expected to finance Detroit’s excesses forever by trading in one PLC for another every 24 months or so. 1977 was a time of change, at least in some regards, so perhaps there were two tracks heading in different directions. Many cars were being downsized, the CC posterchild of which in regards to Detroit at least is surely the Chevy Impala/Caprice, rebirthed for 1977.
Yet here is Ford, and the coupe version of Ford’s standard bearer full size car that proudly blathers on in its brochure with, and I quote, the first paragraph: “Ford hasn’t forgotten the big car family. For 1977, some car-makers will offer you only shorter, narrower, lighter “Full-Size” cars. Ford has a better idea. Ford feels people who want the traditional full-size car they’re used to should have that choice. So Ford hasn’t reduced the 1977 Ford LTD by a single inch. So suck it, GM, and burn at the altar of economy, you commie bastards!” Uh, I added that last sentence, but you know it was in there before someone cut it out. The rest of it though actually is the lead paragraph in the 1977 LTD brochure as per above.
They either didn’t see the writing on the wall which is admittedly hard to see with your head in the sand, or they figured Americans would buy their oversized junk forever. Well, they were actually probably right, except now the modern “PLC”, linked here is longer, wider, with far more ground clearance, and usually has a trunk without a trunklid. Ford’s version wears nameplates starting with an F and ending with a zero although their compatriots offer pretty much the same thing with a different badge. While this car measures in at 224.1 inches and most would consider that very long, every single 2025 F-150 except the smallest regular cab short bed is longer than that. By up to twenty inches in fact. And that’s the smallest and lightest version of the F-series…
And look, a hitch! The 1977 LTD line, when properly equipped, is rated to tow 3.5 tons.
February 1977 probably featured a few dark days in the hell of Detroit as the winter of 1977 was a hard one when this beast was unleashed upon the populace, coincidentally also the same month that the Eagles released “Hotel California” as the second single off the album with the same name, a million miles away from Detroit and yet perhaps also relevant to this car or at least what it purported to be about. Assigned to the District Sales Office in Denver (DS0 76) this car was likely local to Northern Colorado its entire life before ending up here where I found it. I couldn’t find a VIN decoder for the LTD line but the lower line gives various info if anyone is interested in tracking it down.
But this car that I present here knew that the good times were coming to a close. Or whoever ordered it knew. Hence they ordered it in a color called Dove Gray with a Dove Gray Landau half-top. Dove Gray by any other description is Cadaver Gray, or Decomp Gloss. Think of a bucolic backwoods setting in the early morning, maybe a deer grazing, perhaps with a light mist in the air…as that mist settles on a corpse if it’s laid out near the river’s edge…No metallic content, just gray and a little shiny. It’s impressive that this color offered by Ford foreshadowed the death of color (or the color of death?) across the automotive spectrum. The mold growing on this thing doesn’t exactly hurt that simile either.
This may in a (very) perverse way be akin to the Audi TT, the one that brought gloss gray back to modernity and fashion, done 21 years ahead of time and like all things of old being twice as big and heavy as the newer, more modern version that showed what stylish and two-doored could mean, yet also a bit of a dead end stylistically in retrospect. And no moves on the asphalt dance floor of course with this LTD, besides maybe the Jelly Roll and perhaps the Flounder. Today of course that pendulum is swinging (or has swung) fully back towards the big, heavy, and clumsy, at least amongst our national automakers with again little regard or thought of a long term future because by golly, we were promised cheap and plentiful gasoline that I’m still waiting to actually see reduce significantly in price, this last week surely hasn’t trended that way. As long as someone believes though, we’ll be alright, thumbs up all the way!
But nobody cares anyway, and all the laurels, crests, and piles of filigree are as devoid of substance as they appear, yet man’s hope springs eternal (never you mind the definition of insanity) while history repeats endlessly. This car though is at least a squirt of Iacocca’s wet dream, which doesn’t really bear thinking about, but penance must be paid for such transgressions as above. Show me a laurel, I think of Caesar (Julius, not Little I mean). It didn’t end well for him now, did it?
Of course not, and look at the travesty that is this “pillared hardtop” – that’s not just some little frilly pillar, that’s a massive expanse of metal that has its own freaking fixed window in it! Hardtop my ass, really now.
And this. The Ford name spelled out in single letters is fine. Pan down and we have a bush of filigree on the white background. What’s it doing there? Shave that off!
And what’s up with the alligator skin background of the LTD lettering applique in the rear reflector panel? Or does that represent the skin of the lot lizard at the truckstop with her four packs of Parliaments a day habit that drives this home at 4am? Like Parliament says “Only flavor touches your lips”, good, I wouldn’t want the touch of that skin on my lips, the thought of the flavor seems ghastly enough. Why though does it adorn this car?
I will say, in this car’s defense, that the metal under the vinyl (also Dove Gray by the way) is in impressively good condition. This is the worst of it, and even that looks like it would clean right up with minimal sanding. The lower rear window corners as seen earlier are even better and nicely solid, which is a little shocking.
Our cadaver isn’t fully putrified as of yet, the inside is still nicely red when opening it up. That door is almost beyond belief as to its length, even here in the junkyard it can’t fully stretch out. That ashtray I believe is actually for the rear passenger, one on each door for each rear side. And while the landau top made me think this was the Landau Edition at first, that does not appear to be so as that would have carpet on the lower door panels which this does not, so the top is from the options menu.
It’s almost minty fresh in there, good thing the owner thought to put a saddle blanket on the seat before saddling up in this stallion. It’s got the requisite cliff-faced dashboard that never fails to turn me off but what seems like generous enough room up front if you like lounging as if in a dentist’s chair while traveling down a dark desert highway with cool wind in your hair… and Boom! Rick James was too super freaky and got the boot, Don Henley’s in the back now next to Donna.
As in its upmarket showroom brethren, the driver is treated to switches and buttons galore in an enveloping fashion, even if not everything is powered or electrified such as the windows in this case. And a little fake wood always improves the ambiance, and so what if it’s fake, there’s a whole medical industry around fake wood these days, who’s the wiser? Whatever provides pleasure for the user, I say, it’s not for others to criticize, stay out of my cockpit.
I’ve been chided for my critiques of GM cars in the past so I’ll go on the record here as pointing out that Ford sucked just as bad in the area of instrumentation, perhaps being slightly better in not leaving as many obvious blank areas but what’s missing is still missing. The driving sensations may be numb, but that doesn’t mean the driver him or herself is numb to information. Or maybe they are numb, cocaine is one hell of a drug…
Ford calls this a six-passenger vehicle, maybe that’s why Ford never fielded a competitive minivan, they just figured this was good enough. Since there is no LTD or Thunderbird or Mark V, let alone Mark anything anymore, clearly it wasn’t. The fairly well matching red crushed velour seat cover the owner fitted here though is impressive in that it looks almost factory. What’s in the floorwell?
Eesch, not something I’d want to kick off my Crocs and dig my toes into, that shag looks like it came straight from Mr. Furley’s living room.
Crawling out of the back and towards the trunk, it apparently holds two large full size tires. My back hurts just looking at the half yard of horizontal plane to lift them over before even breaching the sill while trying not to bang my shins on the trailer hitch.
This one appears to have the optional 400 cubic incher underhood, with a thirst that is decidedly unLTD. The 2 barrel carb sucks down the fuel to produce a less than scintillating horsepower rating of around 175 but I suppose its appeal is in the torque rating of around 270 (I found various claimed figures for both ratings, this is a sort of average).
It’s so big that I needed to get a second shot, a no charge bonus for you, dear reader. People seem to bitch about modern engine compartments, what to start with here with this much sheer acreage and it’s all packed tighter than a 5oz tin of sardines along with a two foot reach to the nearest component.
I’ll hereby leave you with what reminds me of the mournful eyeball of the aforementioned corpse at river’s edge, plaintively staring yet unseeing. The car saw this coming decades ago. Bummer the owner didn’t spring for the Landau trim, then we would have had an eyelid to pull down over it before I wrote these last writes, uh, rites. Right then. Although it still has the same thing (what the hell is that anyway, a lion? The hounds of hell? Lido’s dog?) that’s stenciled again in triplicate between the lights on the lid itself. It’s spooky.
Related Reading:
The 7P62S VIN prefix means 1977, Minneapolis-St. Paul assembly plant, LTD two-door hardtop, 400-2V engine. The paint code you know; the trim code is red interior, which is of course apparent, I think the 6 axle code is a 3.00 open axle; and the transmission code probably means a C6. I’m unclear on the date schedule codes, but at a guess, January 1977, second week?
This is similar to the car from the Movie “Uncle Buck” correct?
I am not sure if it is the exact year, and the movie car is Root Beer Brown.
Uncle Buck had the ’77 Mercury Marquis “Brougham”, I reckon.
Send for a Marti report!
Full size American cars were about isolating you from the outside world and moving you along in absolute quiet comfort. Big Fords absolutely excelled at that. Aside from the goofy window treatment I like these cars though given the opportunity I’d prefer the Mercury Marquis.
Imagine leaving work after a stressful day and the drive home offers you absolute air conditioned living room comfort with only the sound of your local classical music station and perhaps the occasional audible tick of a clock as your companion. I’ll take that!
It seems like after 1972-73, nobody could figure out to do with the venerable 2 door hardtop. Everyone came down with Opera Window Fever and found diverse ways of botching the roof lines of the big 2 door cars.
I loved that brochure language. And you didn’t go far enough to quote the classic “road hugging weight” that was actually in print. You left out one possibility in the “what were they thinking” theme – pure cynicism. “We are 2 years behind GM in making our cars sensibly sized and will put them on an even shorter wheelbase, but until then, we got nuthin’.” Pity the poor guy who took this celebration of the big American car seriously but waited a couple of year to save up his down payment.
Given the state of the economy in 1979 (horrible interest rates and tight credit), saving up before trying to buy a new car wasn’t a terrible idea, TBH.
As for the little animals on the emblems, those go back to the 1950 Ford crest. A piece at the Jalopy Journal claims that it derives from an actual coat of arms, with lions that signify “dauntless courage”. I would imagine it would take dauntless courage to get into this particular car, so those little lions are surely a helpful reminder for those so inclined.
I got a chuckle out of your excellent writing! My dad had a light blue 77 Ford for his company car at General Electric. This brings back memories!
I never could understand why these big Fords were so strangely optioned.
This one, this fine example here, has cruise control, the trim/vinyl top junk, a stereo and A/C. Not even the color matching seatbelts!
We, for a very short time (Paul N.) owned a 1977 LTD Landcow. It had vinyl top, clock, cornering lamps, A/C, and tilt steering. No right hand mirror, or reclining seats. Nope, with the 400-2v it was strictly race…and church on Sundays!
Great find! Don’t miss these at all
Maybe they’ll come out with a steel roof “convertible” that doesn’t retract.
It appears that the warm smell of colitas may have been replaced by something more rodent-related.
I very much agree with the association you’re making between this LTD and the modern “PLC”. Both represent completely unnecessary excess, but there seems to be constant appetite for something like that among American car buyers. I can’t explain it, it’s not rational (although numerous attempts have been made to make it “rational”, e.g., Big cars are safer….I need to tow my boat twice a year…We have kids…), but in the end I guess there is simply no accounting for taste. I do think that taste is set by what you’re used to, and Americans have always been “used to” living physically large automotively.
Anyhow, great find. This one looks like it sat alongside someone’s driveway until life events (Uncle Buck passed…) demanded a call for the wrecker. I’ll bet it starts. The AC is going to need some work, but this is best driven with the windows down anyway.