2017 Lincoln Continental Spied! It Really Is Happening
Lincoln luxury marches toward production with few changes.
What It Is: Lincoln’s new Continental sedan, captured here wearing an exclusive new, trippy-ball body wrap while testing near Ford’s global headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. Despite having only
just debuted in concept-car form at the 2015 New York auto show, the Continental project has allegedly been well underway for some time, an assertion backed up by the largely complete-looking car you see here.
Why It Matters: Lincoln publicly stated that the Continental would be built and that the production version would look more or less exactly like the concept car. To that end, we can see several design cues through this prototype’s camouflage that indicate the brand hasn’t changed much. The LED head- and taillights, not to mention the sedan’s general proportions, are all dead ringers for those of the New York show car, which, depending on who you talk to, is either a really good thing or an indication that Lincoln still isn’t taking the daring risks some think it should and
possibly even copying others. What we do know is that the Continental is poised to better tug at the aspirational hearts of luxury buyers than the sad-sack
MKS, or even the last proto-Ford to wear the “Continental” name, for that matter.
Platform: Luxury snobs will pooh-pooh the Continental’s front-drive-based architecture, but there’s no denying that the sedan’s long wheelbase, short overhangs, and powerful greenhouse proportions at least trick the casual viewer into thinking the rear wheels are the only ones doing the driving. Even so, all-wheel drive will be standard. The setup will be bolted to a platform that we’re told is an enlarged version of the Ford Fusion/Lincoln MKZ’s global CD4 architecture. The rather extreme size differential between those smaller sedans and the Continental will place a great deal of the engineers’ focus on chassis stiffness; one potential drawback could be excess weight from additional bracing. Another potential pitfall is that Lincoln could—in a misguided attempt at cost savings—ditch much of what made
the show car’s interior such a figurative and literal dazzler.
Powertrain: Here, too, the Ford thread comprises much of the Continental’s stitching, with a 3.0-liter version of the F-150’s
twin-turbocharged 2.7-liter EcoBoost V-6 likely the only choice for American consumers. Lincoln could sell the 2.7-liter as the base engine, however, and add something above, while at the same time giving global markets such as China a turbocharged four-cylinder at the bottom end. While Lincoln could launch the Continental with one of its current six-speed automatic transmissions, we figure that by the time the luxury sedan goes on sale, Ford’s new nine- and ten-speed automatics (
co-developed with General Motors) will have come online and be available for use. Finally, the all-wheel-drive Continental is rumored to be in line for a variant of the new
Ford Focus RS’s sweet torque-vectoring setup—but likely tuned to be less “gymkhana” and more “all-weather secure.”
Competition: Audi A8, BMW 7-Series, Cadillac CT6, Hyundai Equus,
Kia K900.
Estimated Arrival and Price: Given how the Continental’s body structure, lighting elements, and other key features seem “finished”—even on this covered-up prototype—the car can’t be too far away from going on sale. In fact, we know it’s not too far away from going on sale, because Lincoln said in New York that the Continental was coming “next year.” Figure on a splashy debut at the lavish Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance later this summer before sales begin sometime in 2016. Pricing is likely to go where no modern, non-SUV Lincoln has dared tread: the $60,000-and-up range.
-->>
http://www.caranddriver.com/news/2017-lincoln-continental-spied-it-really-is-happening-future-cars
-------------
Headlights and grill outline look like the ones on the concept.
There was potential.
