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Mercury Cougar from Bond film 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' is up for auction

To a James Bond fan, this is a very cool and important car. This 1969 Mercury Cougar XR7 up for auction by Bonhams was one of three used during the filming of 1969's "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," the one-and-done film starring George Lazenby that's a dark horse favorite among many Bond fans (this one included, there's a Japanese-market 'OHMSS' poster hanging behind me as I type this). However, this was not James Bond's car in the movie. He drove an Aston Martin DBS, including in the film's pre-titles sequence when he follows Tracy di Vicenzo driving her bright red Cougar. She would go on to rescue him with it in Switzerland (hence the skis), sacrificing its pretty red paint and body work in a demolition derby on ice that they use to shake Blofeld's Benz-driving goons. Later, after getting caught in a blizzard, they seek refuge in a barn -- a pivotal scene in the film and one where this particular Cougar was apparently used.  ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE | Ice Car Race However, even without the Bond connection, this Cougar is a very cool car. It was one of only 127 in 1969 to be fitted with the top-of-the-line 428 CobraJet Ram Air V8 rated at 335 horsepower. Tracy had a serious muscle car. Bonham's doesn't seem to have thought to provide a Marti report, but I'm guessing the build of XR7, convertible and a color combo of matching red exterior and interior wasn't exactly a common one. Well, we know there were at least three. With skis and French number plates, too.  As for the '69 Cougar itself, this was the only year it looked like this: it got a new body for '69 that would last two years, but the horizontal grille slats that extended over the headlight doors (so cool!) didn't carry over to 1970. It looked worse, and it could easily be argued that it was only downhill from here for the Cougar.  The auction is set for December 16 and Bonhams is estimating a sale price of between $130,000 and $200,000. That certainly makes sense given the rarity of a CobraJet Cougar, the film connection and the complete restoration undertaken by the man who found it in a classified ad in the late 1980s. He originally just wanted it for the engine until he discovered the Bond connection. I actually saw this very car at the 50th Anniversary "Bond in Motion" exhibit at the Beaulieu Motor Museum in England back in 2013 (pictured below). There's also a model of the thing sitting next to me.

Junkyard Gem: 1995 Mercury Tracer Trio

With the rise of Radwood, cars with exaggerated characteristics associated with the 1980s and 1990s are cool again. That means some combination of pastel and/or neon colors, squiggly squeezed-from-toothpaste-tube graphics, nonfunctional decklid spoilers, giant TURBO badging, and kicky youth-centric nomenclature are required if you want your wheels to be considered in compliance with the sacred tenets of Radism. I do my best to find rad machinery while crawling around in car graveyards, and since I came of driving age in 1982 I know a bit about the subject. Today's rare Junkyard Gem shows us the Mercury Division's belated attempt to sell fun cars to rad-leaning youngsters: a Tracer Trio, found in a Denver yard a few weeks back. The Trio package added 310 bucks to the cost of the $11,280 base Tracer sedan (that's about $575 on a $20,925 car in 2022 dollars), and it got the hip-and-trendy young buyer a leather-wrapped steering wheel, seven-spoke wheels, a decklid spoiler and these rad fender badges. I'm going to say that the much louder graphics and candy-cane-colored displacement badges on the Pontiac Sunbird W25 out-radded the Tracer Trio by a mile, but then Pontiac generally out-radded everyone in those days. Even Plymouth got into the act with such radness as the Breeze Expresso and Sundance Duster (we'll overlook the anti-rad Horizon Miser here). Perhaps tellingly, Mercury, Pontiac and Plymouth all got the "Old Yeller" treatment not long after the Rad Era ended. The Tracer name always went on Mercuries built on Mazda platforms, starting with the Australia-built, Ford Laser-based 1987-1989 cars and then continuing with Mexico-assembled, Ford Escort-based 1991-1996 cars. That generation of Escort/Tracer was mechanical twins with the Mazda Protege, itself the bridge between the 323 and the Mazda3. Some Tracers got the a 1.8-liter Mazda engine that was related to the Miata's engine, but this one has the pure-Detroit CVH 1.9. You're looking at 88 horsepower right here; the Mazda 1.8 offered 127 horses. At least the original buyer of this car got the base five-speed manual transmission instead of forking over $815 extra (about $1,510 today) for the four-speed slushbox. As a 29-year-old slacker living in San Francisco's Mission District and driving a hooptie '65 Chevy Impala sedan at the time, I would have taken the manual transmission without the Trio package, had I been forced to buy a new Tracer.

NHTSA upgrades Ford floor mat unintended acceleration probe

According to a Bloomberg report, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has upgraded an investigation into complaints of unintended acceleration lodged against Ford vehicles. The investigation began in June of 2010 when just three complaints had been received and it only concerned the Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan, but this was at a time when the phrase "unintended acceleration" made grown men go pale. With 49 additional complaints received since then, the investigation has been reclassified as an engineering analysis - the last phase before a recall - and it has been expanded to include the Lincoln MKZ, making for a total of "around 480,000" units affected between the three sedans from the 2008 to 2010 model years.
The ostensible cause is that floor mats are trapping the accelerator pedal, but according to a Ford statement at the time, the entrapment is due to owners placing the optional all-weather floor mats, or aftermarket floor mats, on top of the car's standard floor mats. NHTSA has backed up that assessment, pinning the blame on "unsecured or double stacked floor mats."
On the face of it, it would appear that NHTSA has upgraded the status not because of Ford's error, but owner error, and Ford has stated publicly that it is "disappointed" in NHTSA's move. On top of NHTSA still being skittish after that other unintended acceleration debacle, it could be seen to be taking its time investigating all of the variables: it's reported that Ford changed its accelerator pedal design in 2010, a "heel blocker" in the floorpan has been considered a potential culprit in how the floor mats could be trapping the pedal, some drivers have said the floor mats weren't anywhere near the pedal, and according to a report in the LA Times, in "a letter sent by Ford to NHTSA in August 2010, the automaker said it found three injuries and one fatality that 'may have resulted from the alleged defect.'"