Further to our discussion of the visual attributes of the 2017 Lincoln Continental, here is a view of the current car and one where I generously added more length front and back.
Put together like this you can see how wrong the Lincoln really is. There is no point in making Lincolns off Ford platforms. They should do it the other way around. It looks like the front wheel is about half a wheel’s diameter too far back on the existing design. It could be that my version would be too long in reality. It just shows you can’t design a car piecemeal. Proportions matter.
Driven To Write 
Good point, very well made.
Thanks. When you look at the original it quickly seems to become the incorrect deviation. It could be that the car looks better seen from a natural 3/4 view in the metal. However, if it looked correct in an ideal profile it would certainly look much better in normal conditions. The Genesis car has this advantage and I feel that even if the UK press don´t rate it, a lot of prospective middle marker customers will take one look and think: V8, nice appearance, sold. With the Lincoln I see a touch of the Versailles phenomenon though at a higher lever. Lesson: don´t base expensive cars on cheap cars in a way people can detect.
Motorauthority reckons the Conti is over 5 metres long. My version would probably be 5.5 metres long. Oh dear.
The forthcoming Cadillac CT6 looks like it will make a more convincing full sizer. One wonders why American manufacturers are loathe to offer anything truly large, outside of their SUVs and pickups? Buyers did not flock away from the full size segment because of their gross tonnage, but because they were gross.
I suspect it’s too late for the full-size luxury sedan. The Cadillac Escalade now seems to occupy the space left vacant by a proper full-sized Caddy. Buyers appear to view a big Cadillac saloon as an old man’s car, while the truck enjoys a more youthful image and hence a wider market. The Escalade is gross in just about every sense of the word, but that doesn’t seem to matter.
The grosser the better, it seems to me. Otherwise I can’t explain the mass (!) of Q7s, X6s and GLE Coupés I see day by day.
While I generally favour FWD proportions, they’re definitely not suited to large three-box saloons. But I still believe that the Lincoln will look better from any other angle than the one shown in the picture.
It’s a pity this view looks so badly wrong. Lancia Thesis springs to mind.
To me the Lincoln reeks of inexpensiveness, so I much prefer the modified longer view presented here. As it stands it seems little more than a bloated Fusion/Mondeo and mechanically that’s all it is anyway.
The interior is also a letdown. The chosen cut lines for the centre stack are those of a much less expensive vehicle in my view, and none of it looks particularly bespoke. It’s as if Ford ordered up a plain and not particularly inspired design, and then spent money for one grade higher (but nowhere near top line) plastics, with a geegaw here and there to impress the well-off but not particularly discerning US punter. Not one extra penny was spent making anything really nice. It is just a car, size large.
I find it a cynical exercise which the new Genesis trumps easily in every way.
Agreed.
It looked okay at first. I was fooled.
Lincoln Versailles, I now think. Have they not learned?
The Continental has bombed in the market. It had a super interior and a cack-footed exterior. The missing 40 cm between the front wheel arch and front door cost Ford a lot of money. Whoever signed off the package proportions needs to be told not to do it again.