The only passenger car nameplate left across the Ford and Lincoln divisions is the S650 seventh-generation 2024 Ford Mustang in EcoBoost, GT, Dark Horse, and GTD form. Although it’s the best-selling sports car in the region, that’s hardly enough for traditionalists, right? In fact, Dodge just dropped the bomb on it with the new eighth-generation Dodge Charger that will sell both as a four-door sedan and as a traditional two-door fastback coupe with EV and ICE powertrains.

In fact, while Dodge still labels it as a muscle car, its dimensions make it more of a land yacht or personal luxury car, especially when equipped with the fresh 3.0-liter Hurricane twin-turbo inline-six mills that are good for up to 550 horsepower. As such, at the moment, Ford doesn’t have a response to that. Not in the real world, at least. Meanwhile, across the imaginative realm of digital car content creators, somebody has decided to do something about that.

Meet Jim, the virtual artist known as jlord8 on social media, who loves messing around with all things CGI from Blue Ovals, so maybe this reborn Mercury Cougar design project is unsurprising. It all started with a reborn Lincoln Mark IX, actually, and this ninth-generation Mercury Cougar is a quick remix of that one. Some will say it’s even better, though, as the pixel master gave fans of 1990s cars a shout-out with the formal roofline.

Of course, they are both merely wishful thinking; there is no doubt about that, especially since Mercury as a brand is also dead, not just the Cougar and its long lineage of eight generations that were produced between 1967 and 2002. Besides, the CGI expert didn’t even use the 2024 Ford Mustang GT or Dark Horse as his digital base of operations and instead modeled the Lincoln Mark IX and Mercury Cougar on top of the fresh Mercedes-AMG GT sports car!

Hopefully, though, Ford will soon come with new versions for the S650 Mustang that was first presented at the 2022 North American International Auto Show and then took its sweet time before starting production at Ford’s Flat Rock Assembly Plant in May 2023 and sales during the summer. Right now, the EcoBoost has 315 hp, the refreshed fourth-gen 5.0-liter Coyote V8 makes out 480-486 hp for the GT and 500 hp for the Dark Horse models, and then Ford jumps to no less than 800 horsepower for the GTD with the 5.2-liter supercharged V8.

As such, there’s enough space for one or two Shelby models to come with a V8 and teach the new Dodge Charger Sixpack a lesson or two about ‘there’s no replacement for (V8) displacement.’