Thursday 2nd April 2015

Lincoln Continental - New York 2015

The vast American luxury sedan makes a triumphant return

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One of the first things you notice as a car nerd in 2015 New York is that almost all of the Crown Victoria taxis have gone, replaced for the most part by a motley assortment of Toyotas, Hondas and Nissans. And that almost all of the vast Lincoln Town Cars that used to ply their trade as limos on the city's streets have disappeared too, replaced by the unlikely sight of hundreds of equally vast blacked-out SUVs. It's a timely reminder that the big American saloon is pretty much dead.

Looks like a V8, actually uses Ecoboost V6

Which is why it was great to find the Lincoln Continental concept at the show. Ford's supposedly posher US sister brand has been struggling for years, producing little more than fractionally blingier versions of Blue Oval products and incredibly pretentious advertising. This looks like a great place to start a future back-to-basics direction, and the show hadn't even opened before people were likening it to a blue-collar Bentley.

This in turn triggered a spectacular social media scrap with the real Bentley, where design boss Luc Donckerwolke clearly reckoned the American Conti was far closer to imitation than flattery. "I would have called it a Flying Spur and kept the four round lights," he wrote on his Facebook page, before posting "do you want us to send you the product tooling?" on the page of David Woodhouse, Lincoln's design director. Proper handbags.

But while you can't deny there's a strong similarity between the two cars, Lincoln can argue that it's been producing vast, square-rigged saloons for longer than Bentley has. Remember The Matrix? That featured a 1965 Lincoln Continental with suicide rear doors with more than enough presence to out-act Keanu Reeves during the time they shared together; at the same time Bentley was still doing curved wings.

Lincoln is happy, Bentley less so

Anyway, enough bitching. The Continental looked great on the stand, and is clearly very close to production reality. Power comes from a 3.0-litre Ecoboost V6 slightly disappointingly - if ever a car was designed for V8 wuffle it's this one - and the interior is superbly over-the-top. How can you not love a car with 30-way adjustable power seats? And carpets thick and soft enough to make the back of a Rolls-Royce Phantom feel like it's trimmed in nylon weave.

We're also told that something very similar will be going on sale as early as next year in the 'States, and there are also rumours that the production version will get the Focus RS's super clever torque biasing four-wheel drive system, although probably not the Ford's drift mode.

There's zero chance of it coming to the UK, sadly - certainly not unless you want to ship one in yourself. But just think how much fun it would be to drive one into the Bentley car park and see the reaction...

[Fetchez la vache]

To my eyes it looks far nicer then the Bentley.
Never thought I'd type that.