Frontenac: Forgotten Car Brands

Ford’s one-year-only Canada brand.

1960 Frontenac Print Ad — 1960 Frontenac

It has been historically typical for American-brand dealers in Canada to offer expanded product lineups, generally to give a marque greater appeal to shoppers looking for something either more or less expensive than might otherwise be offered.

Canada

One reason for this is that Canada’s population density is much lower than that in the U.S., so car makers needed to appeal to larger groups of shoppers with fewer stores. As a result, Ford, for example, often sold a premium model that might appeal to potential Mercury shoppers, and Mercury often had a model at the low end of its lineup to appeal to traditional Ford buyers.

1960 Frontenac

An example of this cross marketing came—briefly—for the 1960 model year. That year Ford of Canada introduced the Frontenac to give Mercury-Meteor dealers a low-price compact vehicle to sell.

Ford Falcon

Frontenac was a separate brand, like Mercury was to Ford—but was sold through Mercury stores. Produced for the 1960 model year only, the Frontenac was essentially a Ford Falcon featuring a unique front- and rear-end treatment, and some specific trim bits.

Built in Canada, the Frontenac sold reasonably well by Canadian standards, with shoppers snapping up almost 10,000 examples. The Falcon clone was offered in coupe, sedan, and wagon body styles, with the wagon arriving late in the model year.

Mercury Comet

For 1961, the Frontenac brand disappeared, and the Frontenac car was replaced by the mechanically identical—and similarly price–Mercury Comet, which was already on sale in the States.

The Frontenac name had been used previously for a model produced by New York carmaker Dominion Motors between 1931 and 1933 for vehicles assembled and sold in Canada.