Junkyard Find: 2008 Mercury Sable, Press Loaner Flashback Edition
When you write about cars for a living, you can get carefully prepared vehicles dropped off at your door (or at airports) for you to experience and then review. Sometimes you even get the experience of wrecking them! The very first press car I ever received was a red 2008 Mercury Sable, so let's take a look at the same kind of car at the end of its 16-year career.
The 2008 Sable was available in just six exterior colors: Light Ice Blue, Dark Ink Blue, Black, Oxford White, Silver Birch and Merlot; it appears that nearly all of them were Dark Ink Blue or Black. Once I decided I wanted to write about a junked '08 Sable in Merlot, it took me a couple of years to find one with the correct color and that wasn't crashed beyond easy recognition.
This one is at the U-Pull-&-Pay in Colorado Springs, which is about an hour's drive from my pad but is still one of my favorite Front Range yards to visit. That's partly because of the nice views of Pikes Peak in the background (the famous peak is the snowy one just above the Mercury's rear door in this photograph) and partly due to the mysterious prevalence of interesting Mitsubishi and Mazda products I find there, plus many examples of cool old Detroit iron.
Matter of fact, there are eight Chevrolet Corvairs there right now, including an extremely rare 1968 500 coupe (which UP&P thinks is a 1963 model). But we just saw a Corvair in this series less than two years back, so today you're getting a history lesson about decline-and-fall-era Mercury instead. If you're desperate for Colorado junkyard Corvair content, check out this '63 Monza Club Coupe I shot a few months ago or this '68 500 Sport Coupe I shot last month.
The original Sable was a Mercurized Ford Taurus, sold from the 1986 through 2005 model years. Sales numbers were pretty good until deep into the 1990s, with better than 100,000 units sold in most years through 1995.
Then the suits in Dearborn decided to kill the Sable after 2005, with the Taurus itself following after 2007 (with all new 2006-2007 Tauruses sold only to fleet buyers beginning with the first day of 2006). The successor to the Taurus sedan ended up being the Volvo S80-based Five Hundred, while the Taurus wagon was replaced by the Freestyle. For the Five Hundred's Mercury sibling, the old Montego name was dusted off. Look, I found a Merlot 2006 Montego just one row over from today's Junkyard Find!
Many people couldn't believe that the hallowed Taurus and not-so-hallowed Sable had been taken behind the barn and shot (never mind that gleaming new fleet Tauruses continued to be built), so Ford sold Five Hundreds and Montegos just for the 2006-2007 model years and then hurriedly renamed them the Taurus and Sable. The Freestyle became the Taurus X.
By 2007, our beloved Sajeev Mehta was describing the Mercury brand as "mildewed" despite his well-known Fordophilia, and it was clear that the division named after the Roman god of thieves (and travelers) was on increasingly thin ice. As it turned out, Mercury was gone after 2011, despite the best efforts of Jill Wagner, and the revived Sable existed for just the 2008 and 2009 model years before being terminated.
So! Around the time the final new Montegos were being sold, I ended up being recruited by the late Davey G. Johnson to write for then-Gawker-owned Jalopnik (I didn't start writing for TTAC until 2010, which I'm pretty sure makes me the longest-serving author here and deserving of a gigantic bonus).
I was perfectly happy writing about silly projects and general hooptiness for Nick Denton's automotive site (and didn't end up quitting my day job as a software technical writer for a few more years), but I kept being told—in increasingly strident tones— that automotive journalists review new cars. Fine, I said, get somebody to drop off a car in front of my house and I'll write about it.
At some point in late 2007, here comes a new Mercury Sable Premier in nobody-will-even-notice-me Merlot. I was still living on The Island That Rust Forgot at that time, so I took it over to the Oakland Estuary to shoot some photos (To this day, I refuse to use official photos provided by OEMs in my car reviews, though sometimes editors sneak them in).
I can't point you to a link to my Jalopnik review of the 2008 Sable Premier, because it never went live on the site due to disagreements with editors over how I'd structured the piece. 16½ years later, all I can recall is that I removed door panels to examine the build quality of hidden electrical connectors and window-regulator mounting hardware, and that I thought Ford had improved greatly in those departments since the 1990s.
I took it on a road trip across the Bay to visit friends living in San Francisco's Western Addition, and I was impressed by its ability to squeeze into tiny parking spots.
I thought it was a fairly generic Detroit sedan with Mercurically squishy suspension and comfortable interior, but nothing special. My daily-driver at that time was a ten-year-old ex-parole-officer 1997 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, so perhaps I was a bit too strict about the Montego's handling.
Today's Junkyard Find isn't a top-trim-level Premier, but it does have the optional "Medium Dark Flint Leather with Light Stone Leather Inserts" seat upholstery. My press Montego had all black leather.
This is one of the 18" seven-spoke bright aluminum wheels that came as standard equipment on the 2008 Sable Premier.
And this is the 17" seven-spoke bright aluminum wheel that came as standard equipment on the base 2008 Sable.
Here's a shiny new 3.5-liter Duratec V6 rated at 263 horsepower and 249 pound-feet.
And here's what that engine looks like when it's 16 years old and in a junkyard.
Today's Junkyard Find was a "49-state" car, not legal for new sale in the Golden State.
A six-speed automatic was the only transmission available.
My press Sable, being a Premier, had a touchscreen display with Microsoft SYNC.
This car got the base-grade CD player (would could play data discs with audio files, if it was in a good mood at the time and you'd formatted and burned your data disc perfectly) and HVAC controls.
Actually, the SYNC rig in my review Sable sucked even by the lenient standards of late-2000s automotive entertainment systems. No Bluetooth, just an AUX 3.5mm analog input jack plus a USB plug for your iPod, and all overlaid with a hateful Clippy-pain-level Microsoft interface.
16 years later, does any of it matter?
I never did get to enjoy writing reviews of new cars, though I still knock out one or two a year thanks to a vestigial sense of duty, and I do my best— not always successfully— to avoid going on press trips. I prefer covering junkyards and obscure history lessons.
I also enjoy alternating junkyard photos with those of the same kind of car when it was new.
Back in 2018, I yanked one of these clocks from a junkyard Five Hundred and reviewed it (just the clock, I mean).
I recommend the 2006-2009 Five Hundred/Taurus/Montego/Sable clock for your car-parts boombox-building needs. These clocks are plentiful in junkyards, very easy to remove, don't require a data connection to the ECU in order to operate (that's a problem with a lot of mid-2000s-and-later analog car clocks, most of which are just stepper motors controlled by the ECU via the CAN bus) and look pretty good. Just be sure to test them in the junkyard before you buy, because many don't work.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
2008 Mercury Sable in Colorado junkyard.
[Images: Author]
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Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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My mom had the 2005 Ford 500. The sitting higher appealed to her coming out of SUVs and vans (this was sort of during a flattening of the move to non-traditional cars) It was packaged well, more room than 90s Taurus/GM H-Bodies for sure. I do remember the CVT was a little buzzy. I wonder if these would have done better if gas hadn't spiked these and the Chrysler 300 seemed to want to revive US full-size sedans. Wonder what percent of these are still on the road.
The Cyclone engine was really powerful, but with a fatal flaw. Ask me how I know.