Lincoln Continental.
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“American Luxury” has gone from large luxury sedans to huge trucks. These large American sedans from Lincoln, Cadillac, and Chrysler are all gone. However, the luxury sedan itself is not. With BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, Audi, Tesla, Lucid, and even Genesis all still offer larger luxurious sedans.
Maybe it’s time for Lincoln to rethink their idea of luxury.
The most famous classic generations of Continentals were 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).
Lincoln never sold more than 12,000 of them in one year and the whole thing was pretty much a failure.
While we will indeed see new sedans from Cadillac, based on the Ultium EV platform, it seems there isn’t much planned for Lincoln. Except for more SUVs.
The illustration above shows what a more classic Continental sedan could look like.