"This long, luxurious coupe carries Mercury's famous low-silhouette styling into the Custom line. There's the promise of agile going and peak performance in every line plus traditional Mercury operating economy and stamina (9 out of 10 Mercurys ever built are still going strong)."
Being "the lowest-silhouette 4-door hardtop ever built" (as an contemporary ad proclaimed), made the Montclair Phaeton certainly the undisputed star in Mercury's lineup for 1956. But when you could omit two doors and fifteen horsepower, you also could opt for the entry-level Custom Coupe and buy similar looks for much less money. The 1956 Mercurys shared their body with Ford, but rode on a four-inch longer wheelbase. This longer wheelbase, together with the horizontal two-tone color split (not exactly pictured here) and the tunneled headlights visually stretched the cars and made the Mercurys look decidedly more modern than their Ford counterparts.