Mercury Means Something to Women

2008 Mercury Mariner Hybrid

DAYTONA BEACH -- With smoke from nearby forest and brush fires clouding the International Speedway here, I retreated to my hotel room to breathe filtered air and write this confession.

It is a simple matter: Ford is right and I am wrong.

It apparently makes perfect sense for Ford to hold on to its Mercury Division, the elimination of which I have advocated for several years.

Although it is terribly difficult for me to admit this -- so convinced was I of the rightness of my position -- it makes even more sense for Mercury to target women in its product development and marketing strategies.

This recantation is painful. I hate admitting that I'm wrong after investing so much passion, so many words, spoken and written, in asserting that I'm right. But I cannot ignore what I've seen and heard, and cannot dismiss or otherwise ignore what I've learned.

Call my conversion the Mariner Hybrid epiphany. It happened like this:

I drove the 2008 versions of the Ford Escape compact sport-utility vehicle -- both the all-gasoline and the gas-electric hybrid models. I found them very much to my liking: attractive inside and out, possessed of reasonable utility and fuel economy, and very pleasant, albeit not necessarily thrilling, on the road.

Both my wife, Mary Anne, and my assistant, Ria Manglapus, two women who are not the least bit chary about expressing opinions, also liked the Escape SUVs. I figured that was that.

But then Ford shipped the front-wheel-drive Mariner Hybrid. I vowed not to waste my time with it. I stood firmly on the rock of reason. The Mariner is just an Escape with another name, I said. Ford simply changed the grille, I said. You ladies go on and drive the thing, I told Mary Anne and Ria. I have more important things to do.

Mary Anne went first. She and Ria have worked out a delicate dance of politesse in these matters, one from which I deem it wise to absent myself.

After her first day in the Mariner, Mary Anne came home raving: "I love it!" she said. "Why didn't we have this one before? It's so much more fun than that Escape. It's different. It's more friendly. It makes more sense."

I was stunned. My wife is an intelligent woman, an elementary school teacher with a master's degree and many hours of postgraduate training. More to the point, she is the consumer from hell -- a woman who thinks nothing of driving dozens of miles to return an item, even something as ordinary as jar of mayonnaise, that she's found wanting in quality or a few cents above the norm in price.