Many distinguished cars have gone out of production simply because they didn’t sell well enough. Check the long list of our “Greatest Cars,” and you will see many that fall into this category. But very few famous cars have gone out of production because they sold too well. 
One of that very select number, though, is the topic of this profile. The LaSalle marque didn’t cease to exist because it faced year after year of deteriorating sales. No, the death of the LaSalle, strange as it sounds, was caused by its success.
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As Desi Arnaz would say, Okay, I have some serious “splainin'” to do, so let’s start at the beginning, which for LaSalle was 1927, the same year that Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris. By the mid-Twenties it had become obvious that the General Motors strategy of offering a variety of models from low-priced Chevrolet to premium-priced Cadillac was not just successful but, practically, a stroke of genius that would eventually lead to domination of the American market and make GM the world’s biggest automotive company. In fact, it was in 1927 that the GM onslaught finally influenced Henry Ford that he would have to build something other than the venerable Model T to stay in business. Read more . . .
fact is, the rumour is not quite as simple as that. Despite commonly held notions, if one takes an indirect look at history, one might stress that Chevrolet, not Ford, actually introduced the small, personal sport coupe or “ponycar” and that Ford was the company that was playing catch-up when it introduced the Mustang.
At times, sales forged ahead rapidly, and at others the company narrowly scaped going under. However, throughout this 22-year period, there was one constant, one everlasting icon that Ford enthusiasts could count on – the flathead 
Certainly, the mid-priced brands from General Motors — Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Buick — and Chrysler’s Dodge division have always had better-defined personas than Mercury, and that has always been to Mercury’s disadvantage. It seems that over the course of its history, Mercury has wavered from being just a tarted-up Ford to a near-Lincoln, which has made it improbable for the buying public to pin down. Of course, in the clutter of the American car market, if a brand has a puzzled image, it really has no image at all. 
Further, those roots are planted intensely in the soil of solidly Midwest Indiana, where they can be traced back to 1903, when Standard Wheel Company, a Terre Haute bicycle manufacturer, decided to enter the infant automobile industry with the introduction of the Overland Runabout, its first motor vehicle.