1977 Ford LTD II Squire Brougham

Successor to the Torino.
The LTD II wagon was only for 1977. Dropped in 1978 in favor of the new Fairmont wagon.

1977 Ford LTD II Squire Wagon | eBay

 

Pretty neat. I noticed it's in Minnesota but it has old PA inspection stickers on the windshield.

 

The dealers website shows a price of $18,500. An identical LTD II wagon sold on BaT a couple years ago for $10,500. Very few that you ever see for sale.

 

Surprisingly, up until a few years ago, these were not overly rare -- especially for a one year only model, and they were quite reasonable in price.

1977 was they year GM introduced very successful down-sized versions of their full-size cars. Ford would follow suit in 1979. Various clues lead me to suspect that at one point they also were considering discontinuing their big LTDs and making the LTD II their new (downsized) full size car. Ultimately, of course, Ford went with new LTDs on their newly developed Panther platform.

 

Bid to $4906 so far.

 

Bid to $5100 with just over 3 days left.

 

Bidding ended at $5500 - reserve not met - no sale.

 

I'm surprised there were no higher bids on this car.

 

I do think it would have bid higher also.

 

1977 Ford LTD II Squire Wagon | eBay

 

It’s funny you mention that. There is a great Motorweek episode of a testing of the 1982 LTD, and there is quite a conversation that this would be the last year for the full size LTD. They may have caught wind that the Fairmont was going away, and the LTD would be the replacement. It was most likely a misunderstanding on the part of the Motorweek staff, or Ford potentially floated a test balloon. Glad they were wrong, and the Crown Victoria sprung to life in 1983. I could not imagine had the “new LTD” of 1983 been the top line model. I’m quite confident the continued Crown Vic panther model outsold the new LTD quite handily.

 

Actually, the Crown Victoria name replaced the LTD Landau as the top trim subseries in 1980. When Ford restyled the Fox body intermediates for '83 and redesignated the top trim line "LTD", all the full size cars were redesignated LTD Crown Victorias to differentiate them.

Wikkipedia shows the following production figures for all body styles:

Year LTD (Fox) LTD Crown Victoria (Panther)
1983 155,758 113,616
1984 213,742 173,489
1985 205,526 199,110
1986 72,483 124,037

As for wagons, the Fox bodies outsold the Panther bodies each year except for 1986, which was the year the Taurus was introduced.

The whole LTD vs. LTD Crown Victoria situation was merely the latest version of the "name game" that many car makers played in the '70s and '80s. In the mid '70s Dodge dropped the Coronet name from their B body intermediate line and renamed them Monaco. This necessitated their renaming the full-sized C bodies Royal Monaco. Similarly, Plymouth changed the name of their intermediate from Satellite to Fury and made renamed their full-sized cars Gran Fury, Plymouth's naming was even more confusing as it applied the Sport Suburban name to both the full and mid size top wagons, meaning you had to use the full name (Fury Sport Suburban vs. Gran Fury Sport Suburban) to differentiate them. And, of course, there was the Cherokee/Wagoneer vs. Grand Cherokee/Grand Wagoneer problem. The former pair was first used on the J series vehicles, then switched to the XJ line of small SUVs, at which time the latter pair was applied to the J series SUVs and, subsequently, to their JX replacements.

If you couldn't follow all that, don't feel bad. Many people couldn't even differentiate between the LTD and LTD II.

My original point was that more than one car maker "downsized" their full-sized cars by simply dropping the line and (officially or unofficially) calling what had been the intermediate line their new full sizers.