The coolest Mercury: Lincoln Concept C

The coolest Mercury we’ll never get to see?

That would certainly be the planned Mercury version of the next Ford Focus. Speculation has been–and we tend to believe it–that it would have revived the name Mercury Tracer. It would have been the first small Mercury in many years.

Ford executives told Lincoln Mercury dealers in February that they will be getting a new small car, an offshoot of the next Ford Focus. In 2009, Ford showed off the Lincoln Concept C at the Detroit auto show–and yesterday confirmed that it will go on sale. That is the Concept C in the photo above. We suspect that a variant of the C would have become that new Merc.

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Mercury has come to that big garage in the sky, and there’s a convoy behind it of what could be more disappearing brands.

After 71 years, the Mercury brand will vanish from the market with little more than a whimper, by the end of the year. The brainchild of automotive pioneer Edsel Ford , Mercury had become little more than an afterthought on the automotive sales charts in recent years, a costly and irrelevant distraction that company officials, after years of debate, finally decided to do away with.

The move is one more step in CEO Alan Mulally’s One Ford strategy which previously resulted in the sale of foreign luxury brands Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover and Jaguar, and will allow the Detroit-based carmaker to put a “laser focus” on rebuilding the struggling Lincoln brand, which has steadily lost ground to luxury leaders like Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and arch-rival General Motors’ Cadillac marque.

The ongoing automotive sales slump has made it increasingly difficult for automakers to maintain brands that don’t deliver, say industry analysts. Several other once-solid nameplates, such as Suzuki and Mitsubishi, are struggling and could be pulled, at least in the U.S. market, suggests Jim Hossack, of AutoPacific, Inc. And plenty of others are on life-support in Europe and Asia.

It’s time for Lincoln to stand and deliver.

Let’s face it: If Ford hadn’t announced it was closing Mercury, nobody might have noticed the brand’s departure. It’s been decades since Mercury was anything more than a way to spread Lincoln dealers’ overhead over more cars.

Lincoln hasn’t set the world on fire either, but it lives to fight another day.