One Owner Cream & Gold Luxury Edition -1978 Lincoln Mark V Coupe -40k Orig Mi on 2040-cars

Auto blog

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.

2021 Lincoln Nautilus' inner chamber: Interior gets a complete redesign

Unlike the sea creature with which it shares a name, the Lincoln Nautilus luxury crossover is steadily evolving. It was refreshed just two years ago when it adopted the Nautilus name (it was previously called MKX) as well as an updated exterior and turbocharged engine lineup. For 2021, the Nautilus doesn't change much on the outside, but it does get a thoroughly redesigned interior. The exterior design updates to the Nautilus are hardly noticeable. The lower intakes on the bumper have been closed up and smoothed over, giving the fascia a slightly cleaner design. The opposite has happened at the back where the faux diffuser area has been given a bit more detailing. Otherwise, the rest of the crossover is unchanged, from the corporate grille to the deeply creased lines over the wheel wells. The inside is the big draw, where the flowing, but somewhat plastic-looking design has been replaced by a glitzier design based on the interiors of the rest of the Lincoln lineup. It features a low, horizontally-oriented dual-plane dashboard with lots of chrome and leather or leatherette. It also has a gap between the center console and center stack that gives the console a bit of a floating appearance. Another big change is the availability of a 13.2-inch infotainment screen running Sync 4. It's the largest screen offered on any Lincoln model. It's also 1.2 inches larger than the unit in its cousin, the Ford Edge. But unlike the Edge's screen, this one is mounted horizontally, and it doesn't appear to replace many, if any, buttons and knobs. Along with Sync 4 comes natural speech recognition, over-the-air updates and wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Mechanically, the Nautilus is unchanged. The standard engine is a turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder making 250 horsepower and 280 pound-feet of torque. A turbocharged 2.7-liter V6 with 335 horsepower and 380 pound-feet of torque is available as an option. Both engines come with an eight-speed automatic transmission. Front-wheel drive is standard with all-wheel-drive as an option. The new Nautilus goes on sale early next year. Pricing hasn't been announced, but shouldn't change drastically from current pricing. The current Nautilus starts at about $42,000. Related Video:

Is Lincoln working on a Continental concept?

The Lincoln Continental wasn't included in our post on the list of trademarks we'd like to see turned into production vehicles – the only Lincoln mention was our idea of transferring its Aviator name to a special edition Ford Mustang. But, like you, the idea of a resurrected Continental is always with us, especially when we read articles about the brand's efforts to redefine American luxury. Ford applied for the Continental trademark in 1953 and renewed in 2005, and it appears they might have something to show for it soon. A web snooper found a development site at the Lincoln domain that introduces us to the "elegantly styled and boldly distinctive Lincoln Continental Concept." There are no images, but we've combined all the text into a single image, above, and the hints we get in three blurb texts inform us that "It represents who we are as a carmaker," that it's an "envisioning of what's to come," that "No question went unanswered" and "No answer went unchallenged," and that it "is everything we know about cars, and everything we understand about people." We also found the tagline "Follow us forward," which doesn't appear on any published Lincoln site page at the moment, and the public is invited to get involved (eventually) by tweeting Continental stories and photos. Could this be the next step in the turgid drama Lincoln Rising? We look forward to finding out. Related Video: