Few things are sadder than a decent car that doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. That, in a nutshell, is the Merkur XR4Ti, Ford’s ill-fated attempt to transform the European Sierra into ...

Thomas has spent two years working in the auto journalism industry, contributing to a UK-based newspaper and writing for Euronewsweek. A full-time writer and lifelong engineering enthusiast, he now ...

Merkur was a failed experiment as far as sales, but the cars were actually pretty cool. The XR4Ti was a sporty coupe aimed at BMW. This example has the stick shift you want, and just 19K miles. At the ...

From the November 1985 Issue of Car and Driver. Some of us have a taste for fine imports. Wines, cheeses, leather wear, movies, shotguns, lovers—there's sometimes a certain saveur built into such ...

Either completely forgotten or ridiculed by the few who still remember it, the Merkur XR4Ti failed because of questionable marketing decisions and not because it was a bad car. Follow us: Throughout ...

Merkur was a failed experiment as far as sales, but the cars were actually pretty cool. The XR4Ti was a sporty coupe aimed at BMW. This example has the stick shift you want, and just 19K miles. At the ...

Justin Cupler has been a member of the TopSpeed team since 2012. Justin's love for cars started back when he was just five years old, helping his dad work on his 1957 Chevy Bell Air and then his 1966 ...

At the dawn of the 1980s, a young go-getter Ford executive named Bob Lutz decided that Ford needed to draw a bead on BMW. Theoretically, he knew what would get the job done, having spent three years ...