After five years of yeoman service in a segment where Ford hadn't played previously - front- drive luxury cars - and five years of new Japanese competition, the Lincoln Continental has been jettisoned in favor of a new entry: a vehicle with a different worldview.
The 6-cylinder giant economy car that was the Lincoln Continental has been replaced by an entirely new luxury automobile, one with the same moniker but a new transverse DOHC V8 engine, a new transaxle, a much trimmer body design, and a visually exciting and incredibly talented dashboard and instrument panel.
Lincoln-Mercury product planners and marketing executives flatly state that their goal was to create the best front-drive luxury car in the world and, further, that the new Continental measures up to their goals.
This is a pretty ambitious assertion. Even with the front-drive proviso, which limits direct comparisons with the superb Lexus LS 400, the Continental will still be measured against the more powerful Cadillac Seville and Seville STS, as well as the bigger Cadillac DeVille and Concours.
So it's hard for us to endorse Lincoln's best-in-class position. But it's easy to call the new Continental better than the car it replaces. It's smoother, it's far more powerful and it offers a level of electronic sophistication that few luxury vehicles can match.
Our model, with aluminum wheels and a 6-disc CD player located not in the trunk but in the console, had an estimated price of $42,125.
The body shell of the Continental is a great deal stronger and stiffer than the old car's, a situation that can lead to quiet ride and brilliant suspension if it's all done right. In the Continental, they have come very close to an ideal setup. The problem we see with the new car is the 4-window roof - not as open and airy as the 6-window roof on the old car - and the evolutionary front- and rear-end designs, which make the Continental look more like a standard sedan than a luxury car.
Up front, the new design echoes the distinctive theme of the Lincoln Mark VIII, and a curved character line running the length of the car is an eye-pleasing update of the slab-sided appearance of the previous Continental. But though it's pretty, it's also conservative and a bit bland - a car with a lovely personality but not much presence.
Better news is the 260-hp V8 engine that replaces the 170-hp V6. This 4.6-liter V8, a distant relative of the engine in the rear-drive Mark VIII coupe, is bristling with technology, including all-aluminum construction and lots of plastic accessories, but its best feature is its power, which will yank the car from rest to 60 mph in about 8 seconds. That is competitive with the best American and Japanese luxury sedans available.
The all-new Continental has kept a lot of the good stuff, such as an electronic, self-leveling air spring with three levels of ride control, and three levels of rack-and-pinion, power-steering assist.
The Continental also has a system called "multiplex electronics," where each major feature of the car is run by a module, and all of the modules interact to get the car down the road, communicating with each other many times per second. And the car maintains a wealth of safety equipment, including standard dual airbags, electronic all-speed traction control featuring braking and engine intervention, and anti-lock brakes.
From door panel to door panel, the Lincoln Continental has been designed around comfortable, upright seats.
And the instruments are gorgeous; they employ a display technique called "virtual image" that projects the instrument faces onto a black field containing the orange moving needles. This gives the main pod a crisp 3-D effect. Also, the Continental's steering wheel has lighted redundant controls for the sound system and cruise control.
