Lincoln Continental.

The illustration above shows what a next-generation Lincoln Continental sedan could look like.

If parent company Ford was still producing sedans that is… And if they had finally got their act together and had a decent new large EV platform to compete with various Cadillac models.

This looks more in line with later Continental models and not the classic generations from the 1960s and even the 1970s. These super-large sedans basically became the Lincoln town car decades later.

While the Continental morphed into a smaller model effectively replacing the Versailles as a Cadillac Seville competitor. The 8th generation actually grew in size and adopted a more stately and upscale design. At least it did look the part of a large American luxury car. However, it was now based on an FWD platform shared with the Ford Taurus. That generation was quite popular with sales doubling from the previous “Seville wannabe” model.

The next generation came out in 1995 and tried hard to look like a sedan version of the Lincoln Mark VIII coupe. It also gained its V8 back. This didn’t really help since the 8th generation was never as popular as the previous one and production stopped in 2002.

There was a revival in 2017. Which was pretty much a disaster. All throughout its history, the most popular Continentals were the ones that had that classic American luxury car look. It seems design experiments turned Lincoln buyers off, at least as far as the sedans are concerned. The 2027 model was basically a new generation Lincoln MKS called Continental (Probably a last-minute name change).

This new Continental was actually based on the same platform as the Ford Fusion. Its interior showed how hard Ford tried to make the Lincoln different from the Ford. But they just tried way too hard. There was way too much cheese plastic chrome and trims everywhere. The whole vibe was one of vulgarity and cheapness. A far cry from the original Continental which was a design masterpiece.

Lincoln never sold more than 12,000 of them in one year and the whole thing was a failure.

If Ford had an actual upscale EV platform, a new Continental sedan could be competing with the smaller version of the upcoming Ultium-based Cadillac sedans. While a larger reborn TownCar could go against the larger model.

While we will indeed see new sedans from Cadillac, it seems there isn’t much planned for Lincoln in general.

Which is really too bad…