Mercury product planners are as aware as anyone of what goes on outside their own domain, and the healthy sales of minivans led them to ask Ford for a van of their own.
Which is exactly what they almost got. As it happened, Nissan was looking to move deeper into minivan territory with something more mainstream than its existing vans, none of which were doing big box-office at the time. To make a long story shorter, Nissan and Ford joined forces to produce the Nissan Quest and Mercury Villager, near-identical twins assembled in a Ford facility in Ohio using components from Nissan parts bins.