Ford Cougar, and other Mexican-American offerings

Some time ago there was an article in MAR Online about a 1990 Ford Cougar produced by Ixo for a partwork series of “Mexican” cars offered by Edicola, a publishing outfit based in italy.  Rather late in the day I went looking for one and after a bit of searching through various Mexican sites with ridiculous shipping charges, and steering clear of some possibly dodgy outfits in places like Romania, Russia, and Slovenia, I found a decent seller in Italy who had one left.

It's a pretty sharp model of a car that may not appeal to everyone but it makes a change from all the models of ‘60s and 70s land barges on offer at the moment. Nicely done and well detailed.

Someone suggested to me that if I couldn’t find one, I could get the earlier BoS model of the Mercury Cougar, but that is being offered at four or five times the price of this Ixo and quite frankly it looks a little lacklustre, plus various examples online all had a grille that didn’t seem to sit quite right.

So I’m happy with this version. I also ordered an Ixo/DeAgostini 1972 Ford LTD Country Squire, and that is quite pretty as well. OK, it’s not up to Goldvarg standards but once I gave the over-shiny grille a touch of black wash it is perfectly satisfactory.

In the course of my searches I was surprised to find three more partwork series of American cars sold in Mexico. Altaya have done “Great Mexican Cars”. Salvat, a publishing firm based in Barcelona, offers “Memorable Mexican Cars”. And an outfit called Madre Editorial based in Mexico City had a series called “Mexican Cars You Mustn’t Miss”. I suspect they may all be part of the DeAgostini empire. They all seem to overlap and of course they all include the (yawn) predictable Ford Mustang, ’65 Ford Galaxie, Ford F100 truck, VW Beetle, etc. But each of them seem to include one or two “exclusives” that the others don’t have.  All the models are churned out by Ixo, and like a lot of other Ixo partworks models, some look really well detailed and others have a more “budget” look to them.

Of course, I may be behind the curve on this and you know all about them, but just in case you aren’t familiar with them, there’s no harm in illustrating a few of them here. Most are 1:43 but there are one or two 1:24 models mixed in as well. (I only realised that after I copied the pics and started writing these notes).

I really fancied that ’59 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz (by Salvat) which looks absolutely lovely, but it turned out to be 1:24. Sorry, but I just don’t have the space.

Oh, and by the way, if US/Mexican pickups and SUVs are your thing . . .