The Correct Pronunciation Of Merkur: Cold Start

Merkur Xrt4ti
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Adrian’s excellent design breakdown of the Ford Sierra reminded me of my old car, the Merkur XR4Ti I bought from Rutledge Wood (that he, himself, bought from Tanner Foust/the Top Gear America production company). I really liked that car and it brought some interesting stories out of people.

If you don’t know the Merkur XR4Ti, the basic story is that Bob Lutz and Ford of Europe thought America needed a competitor for all those sporty BMWs, Saabs and Audis suddenly capturing the attention of architects and yuppies.

There wasn’t enough money to make something of their own so, of course, the company looked to their own German operations.

Merkur Xr4tiFord was making some interesting cars in Cologne, including the Ford Sierra coupe. Why not just import that car? Rather than make it a Ford… or a Lincoln… or a Mercury, they’d start a new brand with the German name for the Roman God Mercury (i.e. Hermes in Greek mythology).

For some reason, the company also insisted on the German pronunciation of the name. I’d seen a few Merkurs growing up and in my mind, they were Murr-kurrs, as if someone had gagged your mouth and asked you to say “Merv’s Cars.”

This was apparently incorrect. The correct way to say it is Mare-koor.

You can even see it in the brochure from the company:

Howtosaymerkur

A friend of mine who worked in marketing for Lincoln-Mercury at the time said the company had a helluva time getting the salespeople to say it correctly and to do so they created an image. It was of a horse (mare) and of a bottle of Coors beer (Coor).

I’m guessing it didn’t work because the brand didn’t last (the appreciation of the German Deutschmark probably didn’t help), but it does make me laugh to think about a bunch of car sales bros getting phonetic advice in picture form.

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86 thoughts on “The Correct Pronunciation Of Merkur: Cold Start”

  3. Never had a problem pronouncing it correctly, considering all the commercials I saw for the Merkur Scorpio.

    I always thought the XR4Ti was one of the sexiest cars ever. I was surprised to learn it was rear wheel drive. There was a white one that used to run around town. I later dated the girl who owned it, but after she had dumped it because apparently it was the biggest pile of shit and was always in the shop. Which explains why I saw it parked at the shop more than anywhere else.

      1. Yep. He’s a Ford nerd in San Diego and has his own XR4Ti and a sweet Fox Mustang notchback, which is how he caught wind of it. So he was shown as the buyer at the dealership, but of course he got outbid when actually trying to buy it, by you, apparently.

  8. Someone in my hometown had one of these when I was a little kid. I didn’t know much about it, but the family who owned it were very cool, so I had assumed that they picked up a European-market Mercury car that wasn’t available stateside as a big-ticket souvenir on an overseas vacation.

    “Merkur” was never particularly difficult for me to pronounce, but I’ve struggled with “XR4Ti” before. At one time, I thought it was pronounced “zer-AHH-tee” and wondered: “Wait, is that a ‘Maserati’ and people have actually been saying ‘My XR4Ti’ all this time???“

  9. I had a Black Scorpio 5 Speed, beautiful cool car lots of storage-Got a keg in the back with the hatch closed! Loved that car, fast enough distinctive looking super comfortable.

    3. I was at a county fair horse show once as a kid, where there was a fun mix of country rubes and posh horse people and we all had a laugh at the announcement over the loudspeaker asking someone to “Please move your Pig-Ott, it’s blocking someone in”

  11. About 5 years ago my bestie and I came back to the shop after a day of autocross when one of the techs excitedly announced he’d found a litter of newborn kittens in the bak of his XR4Ti parts car! As a suckered for all things fluffy, I kept an eye on them over the next week or so till mama stopped being seen around. At that point, I scooped the 8 or so fuzzballs into a box and took them to the local no-kill cat shelter, but not before offering them around. My sister in law adopted the blackest, fluffiest one and named her Merkur. These days she is adorable, but has every bit of the attitude you might imagine of a cat born in the back of an XR4Ti in an industrial/trailer park neighborhood

  12. So I’ve been pronouncing it correctly all along (yay me!) but I never realized Merkur was supposed to be a separate brand and have always called these “Mercury Merkur XR4Ti-s”

    1. One of the all time oddest brand name choices, considering Ford could have just called it a Mercury.
      Like if GM made a new brand called Kadilla and insisting it rhymes with Tortilla.

      1. Mercury was American and for old people, Merkur was supposed to be German and for yuppies who wouldn’t be caught dead in something American. Ideally, Ford would have just bought a real foreign brand instead of making up a fake one, but they were frustrated on that front until Jaguar .

        But, yeah, just translating an existing brand into German was pretty lazy

        1. Lazy and confusing. I speak decent German and have a hard time adjusting my mouth to the German pronunciation when talking about Merkurs (not a particularly common thing, admittedly).

  13. That weird biplane spoiler on the back somehow made it to the Mustang after that. My first fox-body was a 4-banger with some sort of handling package that the dealer was really desperate to get off the lot. Got a great deal and drove it into the ground.

    It was like a GT body / suspension with an econobox engine / drivetrain but it was a lot of fun to drive. It had that biplane spoiler too. Always a great conversation starter.

    2. This is hilarious – like seeing a nanny driving an M5 with kids in the back. The opposite of “I know what I’ve got”.

      The SVO was the ultimate Mustang of the time. It probably would have been a huge hit if they had put a hot 302 or 351 in it, but they went for balance by dropping in the turbo 4 cyl.

      I had a friend who had one at the same time I had a Mustang GT. It handled way better than my GT but was slightly slower in a drag race (which is all we really cared about at the time).

    3. I’ve owned numerous SVOs over the years. In fact, I own one now. My older brother had the XR4Ti. I think the bi-wing originated with the SVO since it came out in 1984 and the Merkur came in 1985.

    4. I was going to tell you that the SVO had that biplane wing first, but it looks like I was only aware of the SVO wing first. They were both officially released in 1984.

    5. My younger brother bought one in blue. I drove it (hooned it). When you floored it to get the turbo up you could watch the petrol gauge plummet. It was a fuking cool car.

  14. There oughta be a rule that you’re not allowed to own or operate a vehicle unless you can correctly pronounce its name. This is absurd, of course, but it would make DMV lines more entertaining.

    1. Oh geebus I’m already imagining the pretentiousness emanating from the Porsche line as they practice their pronunciation on each other before they get to the counter.

      1. Lot’s of BMWs did as well. My old 320is had one, and the handle would just occasionally fall off. But only when it was parked, never when it was being driven. Who knows?

  16. Merkur was really one part of Ford’s wider fixation on acquiring an upscale European brand in the 1980s, they also tried to buy Alfa Romeo off the Italian government in 1986 and Rover Group off the British government in 1988, and finally succeeded in taking over Jaguar Cars in 1989.

    1. According to the company, the US pronunciation is correct. They even launched an ad campaign in the UK to get them to stop saying HI UN DIE. I think in Korean there’s a bit more emphasis on the ‘y’, but otherwise, we aren’t doing too terribly on that one.

    2. I think most people just pronounce it the way Hyundai America tells us to in TV commercials, it might still be wrong, but it’s the company’s own fault if it is

      2. I couldn’t tell you the last time I watched a commercial. I actually had to look it up after commenting this and apparently in America we are to pronounce it rhyming with Sunday. The correct Korean pronunciation just doesn’t roll off the tongue for us ‘Muricans. I looked up the UK pronunciation and said “yeah, I could see Jeremy Clarkson pronouncing it like that…”

        1. “I couldn’t tell you the last time I watched a commercial”

          I wish I could say the same. There is one insidious one for cat treats that keeps popping up on my AP freevee shows. I wish it would stop. I don’t buy cat treats. Those that I know who do have fat cats. That commercial is really annoying and it keeps popping up. Avoid freevee else risk your username checking out.

    3. When Hyundai first entered the US market, there was a story in at least one US periodical stating that, after Hyundai hired a person to run its US sales arm, he had a meeting with their CEO. When the newly appointed US sales executive said he thought that it would be a good idea to pronounce Hyundai to rhyme with Sunday, rather than using the Korean pronunciation, the CEO asked him how many cars he could sell in a year, the reply was “100,000.” The CEO responded with words to the effect of “(I)f you can sell 100,000 cars a year, you can call them anything you want to.”

      I think that this story, even if it is not true, it is so good that it should be.

    4. I change the way I say it each time, rotating through Hun-day, Hyun-day, Hi-un-day, Hi-un-dai, etc.
      An Accent is usually just Hunday, but a Tiburon or Genesis Coupe gets a more flashy pronunciation.

  20. As with the Capri (please don’t call it “Mercury Capri” until the Fox-body era) and the De Tomaso Pantera, these were cars that Ford Motor Company wanted to sell, but didn’t want to sell them at Ford dealers, so they foisted them upon Lincoln-Mercury dealers – who had absolutely zero skill at working with the sorts of customers who wanted cars like these. Fail.

    1. not quite the same, but I know enough people who say “oddy” and “porsh” that I think Americans just can’t wrap their heads around German pronunciations.

      1. I think you’re right. Heckler & Koch is another one. They went so far as to create a separate American pronunciation to prevent a specific mispronunciation (the second word, for Americans, is pronounced “coke”).

        1. I use the German pronunciation for “Aldi” cause it’s… German. People think I’m having a stroke, I stg. It’s a bit of a shame (we all know why, obviously) that Germans in the US hid their culture to the point it’s basically vanished, and nobody has any idea how much German influence still exists in this country today.

          But again, Spanish and Latinx peoples are very proud of their heritage, everyone knows it when they see it, and still, (generally white) Americans say “polo” instead of “pollo”. So maybe it’s just a stupidity thing.

          1. Well considering how successful Americans have been in controlling the global economy, for generations, it’s clearly not stupidity. More likely, it’s simple ignorance, or cultural chauvinism, in most cases. Americans are by and large not multilingual because they don’t have to be. Rather than alter themselves to be able to fit in other places, they require others to alter themselves to fit in here.

            This is a somewhat different thing than stupidity.

      2. People who speak English as their native language (not limited to US Americans) often have a hard time wrapping their heads around ANY pronunciations except the ones of their variant of English.

        1. thats probably very true. from what I’ve seen though, muricans generally seem to think they’re right when corrected, whereas other people do not. especially baffling since the “au” in Audi and “-e” in Porsche are both sounds already prevalent in English. It’s not that they can’t pronounce them, it’s that they refuse to. That’s what irks me.

          *I am an murican fyi

          1. Part of it is, whenever a certain incorrect pronunciation becomes established and commonplace, attempting to pronounce it correctly makes you look pretentious, so even people who “know better” still tend to go with the flow. Lots of Altria sales reps refer to Pall Mall cigarettes as “paul maul”, for example, since that’s become the commonly accepted pronunciation over the past 20-30 years and they’re not going to go through the same spiel of correcting gas station owners every single time meet

        2. And then you get the group claiming, “There are enough people pronouncing it this way or using the grammar this way, so it should be the new ‘correct way’.” Ugh!
          If millions of people are wrong, they are, by definition, still WRONG!!!

          1. What if they’re Elvis fans? Because I have it on good authority that 50,000,000 Elvis fans CAN’T be wrong!

            But also, language is a living entity and people from centuries ago would be horrified by everything we say. Also, everyone pronounces words following the conventions of their own language.

            1. also, language is a living entity 

              I know,- people keep telling me that!

              It’s just that if people are making changes that make it more difficult to communicate, then it is just change for the sake of change. I HATE that. I live that concept through all of the companies I’ve worked-for.

              (Since it has been over 4 years, I’m sure my former employer changed the name of my former department again. New notepads, business cards, and placards for everybody!!!)

    2. Maybe in the US. We have been buying Peugeots, Citroëns, Renaults, Lancias and so on since like forever, and while many people totally butcher the names of the brands, sales have probably not suffered from that.

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