1973 Lincoln Mark Series on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Lincoln Anniversary Concept is the future looking at the past

Remember the Audi SkySphere concept the German automaker revealed on August 10? The long, low, meaty two-door designed in Malibu, California that previewed elements of Audi's coming design language? This is not that car. This is the Lincoln Anniversary concept, a long, low, meaty two-door designed at the ArtCenter College of Design — about an hour away from Malibu — as a potential preview of Lincoln design elements. There's clearly something in the waters of the communal car design trend pool, and we dig it. A few months ago, Lincoln announced it had partnered with the ArtCenter, inviting students to create four concepts that they'd showcase as integral parts of meaningful stories about people. The transportation students worked with classmates in other disciplines like film and animation to imagine what Lincolns might be like in 2040 and beyond, and create short films to put the concepts and stories in motion inside future worlds. One concept needed to hold two people, one to hold four, another would hold four at elevated ride height, and the largest would be a six-passenger vehicle. All of them had to deliver on Lincoln's promise of Quiet Flight driving and a theme called C.A.S.E., for connected, autonomous, shared and electric.  This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Lincoln x ArtCenter College of Design | Quiet Flight 2040 The Glider concept served two people in sedan form, inspired by the Zephyrs and Continentals of yore. As the star of the short "Now You Drive," a son picks up his wheelchair-bound father in the Glider and puts his father in the driver's seat, placing the wheelchair in the back. The father takes the wheel and drives for the first time in years, while the autonomously-capable sedan retracts the throttle and brake pedals and manages speed on its own. Designer Jin Kim posted detailed breakdown of his development work on the Glider, as well as the short film. The page is well worth a visit.       A four-seater SUV concept in the short "Amongst the Stars" features touch-screen windows and an augmented reality panoramic roof. The protagonist gets her first taste of a wide starry night during a family trip to White Sands National Park looking through the glass, the roof aiding her curiosity with displays like highlighting and naming constellations.

2024 Lincoln Nautilus First Drive Review: Lincoln's moonshot (with nits to pick)

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. – It was only a decade ago when Lincoln seemed destined to go the way of Oldsmobile and Mercury. Odd styling, cheap retro interiors and blatant parts sharing with supporting Ford vehicles had this storied American luxury brand trailing the competition by a significant margin. Then things started turning around with the reborn Continental sedan in 2017, followed by the massive and massively improved Navigator the following year. In hindsight, I equate those to the Mercury and Gemini space programs that led to Apollo and the game-changing moonshot. After driving the all-new 2024 Lincoln Nautilus throughout the Palm Springs area, it could very well deserve the accolades and ticker tape parades bestowed upon NASA in 1969. Starting with the new styling, this second-generation Nautilus manages to stand out from the crowd without shouting. There's a quiet resolve in the rounded-over corners and subtle sculpting. The appropriately sized grille has suggestions of woven Bentley rods while a distinctive horizontal bar connects the Lincoln emblem to the narrow LED headlights. Below, two brushed metal accents anchor the fascia with a classy foundation. Down the sides, a distinctive flourish spans almost the entire length of the front doors, and the absence of traditional door handles gives the profile an unusually clean look. Those door handles are integrated into the window frame in the same manner as the Continental, further emphasizing the way reflections and shadows dance across the gentle curves of the bodywork. Around back, there are echoes of Audi or Porsche, but not in a derivative way since it integrates well with the rest of the Nautilus. To my hyper-critical styling eye, I can only find the slightest of nitpicks in a series of horizontal stripes present in the rearmost side window that are repeated in the edges of the headlights and taillights. My nitpicking is typically a good omen, as it means there isn't anything significant to fault it for, and that could very well be the theme of this review. While the exterior is suitably attractive, the interior is downright stunning. The biggest attention-getter is the 48-inch curved panoramic display that spans the entire length of the dashboard. It's the type of design element expected of a concept or prohibitively expensive luxury vehicle, not a production SUV starting in the low $50,000 range. Even better, it works.

A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.