North American car shoppers in the early 1970s had plenty of choices when it came to big, powerful Detroit hardtop coupes at affordable prices. General Motors led the 1971 big-coupe-for-small-bucks sales race with the Impala and Caprice, with Pontiac offering good deals on Catalina Broughams as well. Ford was right there with the LTD and its Mercury siblings, and today’s Junkyard Gem is one of those cars: a 1971 LTD Brougham, found in a Denver-area car graveyard a few months back.
Originally, a brougham was a type of horse-drawn carriage that was very popular among the wealthy in the middle 1800s. In the early 20th century, it became the name for a car body in which the driver sat outside the enclosed passenger cabin. By the dawn of the 1970s, it had become a classy-sounding trim-level designation, used by GM, Ford, Chrysler and American Motors. It appears that the final use of the Brougham name on a new car was by Nissan, on the JDM Cedric VIP.
This car has Brougham badges in many places, including the dash and door panels.
In 1971, the LTD Brougham came standard with a V8 engine, power front disc brakes and a swanky interior referred to as “the Front Room.”
1971 LTD Brougham buyers had to pay extra for an automatic transmission (instead of the base three-on-the-tree column-shift manual) and air conditioning. Nearly all of them did so.
The AM radio was an extra-cost option as well.
The MSRP on this car, prior to those costly extras, was $4,097. That’s about $31,408 in 2023 dollars, and dangerously close to the $4,557 sticker price on the LTD’s Mercury-badged sibling, the Marquis Brougham.
The base engine in the LTD Brougham for 1971 was a 351 Cleveland V8 rated at 240 horsepower. That appears to be what we’ve got under the hood of this car, though it could also be the nearly-identical-looking 400 Modified and its 260 horses (or it could be the 11th engine swapped into this car during its life; in any case, it’s some member of the Cleveland/Modified V8 family).
There’s the typical rust-through you get in this sort of climate, here and there.
Plenty of body filler as well.
Worth fixing up? Probably not, but it’s sad to see it meet such a fate.
Everything is getting noisier, but the LTD stays quiet inside.
