I never get tired of these alternate reality Canadian cars, like these Meteor Montcalms. I’m thinking this front end is a bit more interesting than the ’61 Ford’s.
And those tail lights. Yowza! A bit affected.
Here’s the low end Rideau sedans. Hmm. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe Canada isn’t quite as superior as it’s often made out to be here?
Quelle chic! I have always admired the Canadian styled cars. It was as if the stylists at the car manufacturers had an opportunity to not discard their alternate designs. Fun to look at, especially when I was visiting Canada. Attached is a 1958 Meteor Rideau two-door hardtop.
Great pix. Hadn’t seen these before. The Edsel position should have been filled by the Meteor instead of duplicating Mercury’s space-age niche. These should have been the ’61 Edsel.
Totally agree. I’ve always thought that the ’61 Meteor looks like what you would get if you asked someone to design an Edsel off the ’61 Ford bodyshell on a budget, much like the ’60 Edsel was done. All it needs is some sort of central grille styling element.
The front end reminds me of the ’60 Mercury. I like it!
This car must have the most widely spaced low and high beam headlamps ever; it’s like those drawings and clays from the late ’50s that never got built with really weird quad headlamp arrangements, like two lights stacked in the center of the grille. Nice disguise of the Ford round taillights too, much better than on Edsel wagons. But the side trim is just weird, like the designers couldn’t decide whether to put the chrome strip high or low, so they compromised and chose some of each. And the garish rear fender trim is just unnecessary.
Close. I’d bet that the quad headlight spacing award goes to the 1967 Shelby Mustang with the high beams smack in the middle of the grille. I wonder if there was actually any practical benefit to that arrangement; they looked goofy as hell, that’s for sure.
Oldsmobile was influenced by this headlight setup. They used it on some 1967 and 68 models.
Oldsmobile used the wide-spaced quad headlight arrangement on its 1959 models.
Right you are. I wonder if Ford realized that they used Lincoln Continental stars between the headlights of the Meteor?
I don’t recall ever seeing one of these, production must have been rather low.
Interesting use of children in the ads, I think the little girl in the top picture just poked her eye on the corner of the fin.
Hopefully it’s not too serious, the national health care program doesn’t arrive until 1966!
Obviously, the taillamps are adorned with hockey sticks.
Undoubtedly done to celebrate the Trail Smoke Eaters, who won the World Ice Hockey Championships that year, beating the Soviet Union national team 5-1 in the final. 🙂
1961 was the last year Canada sent an individual team (as opposed to a national team) to the world championships – and we didn’t win another gold until 1994.
Clearly the rear end of 1961 Meteor deserves a place in the Smoke Eaters section of the Hockey Hall of Fame.
I only ever saw one of these, a plain green sedan parked in the neighborhood around 1982. ’61 was the last year for the original Ford-based Meteors.
There has been speculation that Bruce McCall (of National Lampoon Bulgemobile fame) did these brochure illustrations as he was employed by Ford of Canada at the time. I can certainly see the similarity in style.
Perhaps someone out there can explain why the Canadian market needed its own exclusive style. What advantage offsets the cost? No judgement implied – just curious.
Due to the smaller size of the Canadian market, dealers could be very widely spaced, particularly in rural areas, and it was felt that each needed to cover a broader range of the market. The Meteor allowed Mercury dealers to have a low-priced line (Meteor models and prices paralleled Ford’s), while the concurrent Mercury-based Monarch gave Ford dealers an offering in the medium-price field. This equated to GM’s Canadian dealership alignment, where Chevrolet and Oldsmobile were paired, as were Pontiac and Buick (Pontiac was marketed as low-price car in Canada). Chrysler was similar with Dodge-DeSoto and Chrysler-Plymouth dealers. Like Pontiac, Dodge was sold as a low-price make.
In hindsight, would it not have made more sense just to make all of the dealerships Ford-Mercury? Probably.
I’m guessing it had to do with franchise laws and contracts. I’m not sure about how they are in Canada but in the US for example you get an exclusive area meaning that they won’t sell the same brand to the dealer across the street. In rural areas Ford-Mercury stores could have existed. However get into areas with more population and you could have an existing Ford and Mercury dealer too close to each other.
The genesis of the Meteor and Monarch was the Mercury 114. http://oldcarbrochures.com/static/Canada/Mercury/1946%20Mercury%20114%20Brochure/dirindex.html Mercury dealers wanted a lower price car to sell so Ford gave them the shorter Ford body with the Mercury front end, and I believe the Mercury dash. That made the Mercury dealers happy.
Unfortunately it made the Ford dealers unhappy, most likely those from areas with a near by Mercury franchise.
To appease those Ford dealers they got the Monarch version of the Mercury as a mid priced car line and the Mercury 114 was replaced by the Meteor version of the Ford. So you did have Ford-Mercury dealers they were just in disguise.
Or course there is the whole question of why if you are in a rural area w/o a Ford dealer would you sign up for a Mercury franchise in the first place? If you are Ford why didn’t you push the Ford franchise in those rural areas. Selling the Mercury franchise in the rural areas also meant that Ford had to give those dealers trucks to sell http://oldcarbrochures.com/static/Canada/Mercury/1946%20Mercury%20Trucks%20Brochure/dirindex.html I wonder how Ford dealers felt about that.
What a mess, but hey we got weird alternate universe designs as a result!
Ford did seem to realize that the situation in Canada was a mess and costly. So for 1960 instead of selling Falcons at Ford dealers they whipped up the Frontenac and allowed both dealer networks to sell it. Of course that had its own costs.
Ford-Monarch dealers in Canada did sell the Falcon, while Mercury-Meteor dealers sold the Frontenac.
Also strange that they dropped the Frontenac after one year, given that it was a hit. “Frontenac” is a good name for a Canadian car.
What’s with the Ford/Monarch/Falcon sign – was the Falcon not a Ford in Canada? Wouldn’t surprise me as the Valiant wasn’t a Plymouth until 1967.
I think the rationale behind the Frontenac was that the Comet, originally intended as an Edsel, would have been sold by Ford-Edsel-Monarch dealers along with the Falcon, leaving the Mercury-Meteor dealers with no compact. Ultimately, the Comet was not available in Canada in 1960, and when the decision was made to offer it in ’61, the Frontenac was dropped.
There was at least one 1961 Frontenac prototype, which was taken on a cross-Canada promotional tour. Apparently the cancellation came while the trip was underway.
It is bizarre that a much smaller, and less prosperous, market was given multiple models of the same cars, which inevitably sold individually in even smaller numbers. But the Ford-style Mercury Meteor was very common on the road in the 1950’s. The Mercury-style Ford Monarch was rarer in my memory.
Perhaps the actual additional costs were minimal. I think that the under the skin Canadian Fords and Mercurys were more similar to each other than was the case in the US market, so there could have been savings there. Minor alternate trim applications in that case were possibly not a major expense. And it kept dealers happy.
The super-wide spacing between the high and low beams makes me think Elwood Engel was paying attention to Virgil Exner.
I wonder how much of the Meteor, Monarch and the Frontenac design changes were done in Canada by Canadian designers? This car for example got hockey sticks for tail lights and Maple Leaf adornments were not uncommon.
http://oldcarbrochures.com/static/Canada/Frontenac/1960%20Frontenac%20Brochure/dirindex.html
With copy like “distinctively Canadian in every line” they certainly seem to want you to believe that Canadians had a hand in the design. On the other hand using a Maple Leaf as a bullet point does seem too much like a US copy writer pandering to the Canadian market, though it could just as easily have been done locally.
“Just stick a maple leaf on it” is a very common marketing tactic of American companies in Canada.
You ain’t kiddin…
I wouldn’t be surprised if these uniquely Canadian models were typically styled by Ford’s Canadian operations, bearing in mind that they were usually more “badge enginereered” than truly “styled”.
With regard to the 1961 Meteor, though, note the speculation upthread by MadHungarian that the ’61 Meteor’s styling may have originated as a styling proposal for a stillborn ’61 full-size Edsel. I think that makes a lot of sense, in part because the level of differentiation between the Meteor and Ford was much greater this year than it was any other year that the Meteor existed.
Discovering Canadian, Australian, or Brazilian cars made my American car companies in the 1960s and ’70s is like finding unreleased B-sides by your favorite bands.
We often feel the same on seeing the American originals!
The thing that bothers me the most is that upper side trim and the way it jumps up from the fender to the beltline at the leading edge of the door. Ugh.
First thought on seeing the rear…it looks like 1960 Ford quarters grafted onto a 1959 Pontiac.
“ALL NEW FOR 1961!!”
I would like a Canadian alternate universe Ford product. In most cases that leans to the Monarch especially so for 61 as those wide set lights on the Ford, er I mean Meteor just don’t work for me.
Of course I’d be up for a Mercury truck too, even if they are just badge jobs w/o any styling changes.
With the Arctic cold, long winters and barren lands, Canadians are meatier people. Their meatier women know their way around a kitchen. Little known to most folks in the States was the popular Meatier Poutine wagon. It was like a Ford, or a Mercury – but Meatier, with chunks of Moose slathered over the French fries with a brown gravy made from LaBatt and Molson brews, but served in Country Squire manner.
What was great is that the wagon speedometer never exceeded 100 kilometers and the seats were covered in bologna made from beaver.
There is even snow on the ground in late May.
Pretty barren.
In Canada our wagons were de-contented US models, badged as ‘Country Squares’. 🙂
I’ve never actually seen one of the pictured Meteors, but I started noticing cars about the age of six, in 1970. By this time, pretty much every car in Canada would have been a rust-bucket in five years or less.
I had never seen a ten year old car until I moved to the Westcoast in 1976.
TIL (via Wikipedia) that there was a one-year-only full-sized US Meteor as well, also in 1961. It was introduced that year as an entry-level full-sized Mercury model, maybe in anticipation of using the Meteor name for the midsize car marketed (in the US and in Canada) in 1962 and ’63.
The Canadian full-sized Meteor brand was re-introduced in 1964 after the two-year mid-sized Meteor hiatus, but this time as a full-sized Mercury rather than the full-sized Ford-based model it had been though the 1950’s. This was another chapter in my childhood education on brand meaninglessness and degradation in the North American car industry. 🙂
Canadians experience alternate universe cars as well, such as the shipping of the 1955 Meteor tooling to Australia to produce the 1958 Ford models there.
It’s interesting that Mercury dealers on both sides of the border in 1961 sold a car called a “Meteor” that served the same general purpose/market segment, but wasn’t really the same car. The U.S. version was a decontented full-size Mercury, and was badged and marketed as a Mercury. The Canadian version was a restyled full-size Ford, and was just a Meteor, sold by Mercury dealers but not badged or marketed as a Mercury.
And to make it even more of a convoluted mess, the U.S 1961 Mercurys were essentially restyled 1961 Fords in every aspect and content. To say Lincoln-Mercury marketing was a confused mess then is to make massive understatement.
The taillights integrated with the body trim reminds me of this Edsel wagon:
Here are a couple of pictures found during internet travels of the real example.
#2
I’ve always wondered how much the tooling for the changes cost. Couldn’t have been cheap to make the separate trim pieces for such a limited market.
Mercury was gone as a brand here by then it evaporated around 49 so only private imports arrived after that and Ive never seen one of these Canadian models perhaps its the novelty of it but I quite like it apart from the Oldsmobile headlight treatment
Yes, the 1961 year brought about a full size Mercury Meteor for the U.S. I owned a turquoise 2 door sedan that was bought new by a bachelor in central ND; I got the car with 90,000 miles on it.
3 Speed manual on the column, no overdrive, and a 223-6 cylinder engine which sported a yellowish/gold color on the air cleaner. Which was hanging off the side of the carb vertically.(no room for fitment underhood).
Rubber floor mat, radio delete, no clock, no cigarette lighter; a heater the ONLY option. Not even any outside door mirrors. This very car was much the exact opposite of the upmarket Mercury brand being a step above Ford’s offerings.
I only saw one other like it but it was slightly different. Mine was a Meteor 600 but the white over red 2 door sedan was a Mercury 800 with v/8 and automatic as options.
Just how many of these ‘low-line’ offerings from Mercury could have been produced ? I am making a guess they were as few and far between as the Meteor branded Fords in Canada….. slim to none.
18,117 Meteor 600s, 35,005 Meteor 800s and 29,919 Canadian Meteors.