Reinventing Lincoln

The new Lincoln MKZ Floto + Warner for Bloomberg Businessweek

By Keith Naughton

On his very first day as the new chief designer of the Lincoln line from Ford Motor, Max Wolff had, in his words, an “oh, shit moment.” Touring Ford’s design studio in Dearborn, Mich., last January, Wolff made his way to the latest model of the MKZ, Lincoln’s top-selling car, which Ford hopes will finally reverse decades of decline at Lincoln and catapult it into a pantheon with Audi, BMW, and Lexus. Trouble was, the MKZ was a dud. The boxy, narrow model had doors identical to the Ford Fusion, the carmaker’s family sedan for the common man. Its prominent grille with cascading chrome ribs had the look of your grandfather’s mustache, and its boxy headlights evoked Milton Berle’s eyeglasses. Wolff, a 39-year-old, faux-hawk-sporting Aussie, turned to the car’s designer, Solomon Song, and asked: “What were you thinking?”

As Wolff recalls, Song said: “We’ve sort of been waiting for you to turn up so that we can do something different.”

They did. One year since his arrival at Lincoln, Wolff is unveiling the redesigned MKZ on Jan. 10 at the Detroit Auto Show. The car, expected to start at about $35,000, bears little resemblance to the homely model Wolff encountered last January. Wolff, whom Lincoln hired away from Cadillac at General Motors, has retooled the car to make it lower, longer, and wider. The most striking change comes on what Wolff calls the car’s “face,” which he contends can make or break a design. Gone is the geezer grille. In its place are side-by-side sleek chrome apertures, bisected by horizontal ribs that stretch like eagle’s wings into swept-back headlights that flow into the front fenders.

Whether or not car buyers go for the sexier, sleeker Lincoln remains to be seen, but there’s no question that Lincoln needs a hit, if not a miracle. The car was the epitome of cool when JFK was in the White House and the Rat Pack was headlining in Vegas. From a sales standpoint, Lincoln reached its zenith in 1990, when 231,660 were sold. As recently as 1999, the heyday of Lincoln’s behemoth Navigator SUV, the line ranked first in U.S. sales among luxury car brands. Today, Lincoln stands eighth, its image defined largely by the black Town Cars that transport people to and from airports. (Ford stopped production of the Town Car in September.) The average Lincoln driver is 65 years old. Lincoln says it sold 85,643 cars in 2011, down a breathtaking 63 percent since the 1990 peak. The latest indignity came last month, when a 1970s-era Lincoln Continental was used to carry the coffin of deceased North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. “Lincoln’s image is as an old person’s car or a taxi,” says Rebecca Lindland, an auto analyst with researcher IHS Automotive.

A succession of designers have tried to recapture Lincoln’s faded glory, with little success. In 2001, Gerry McGovern, now chief designer at Land Rover, crafted a slab-sided concept car in homage to the classic ’61 Continental in which President Kennedy was riding when he was assassinated. After that, Peter Horbury, who went on to become Volvo’s design director, sought inspiration from the split-bow grilles of 1940s’ Lincolns. Neither paean to the past worked.

“We’re well past the window on Lincoln of being able to relive the glory years,” says J Mays, Ford global design chief. “We’re in a situation now where we need to reinvent the brand.”

Doing so involves transforming consumer expectations about what a Lincoln looks like. “Lincoln is a brand that’s got authenticity and credentials,” says Leslie Butterfield, a luxury car specialist with Interbrand, a consulting company, and author of Enduring Passion: The Story of the Mercedes-Benz Brand. “But it’s important that the design be a break with tradition. I don’t want to feel I’m buying Old Lincoln, I want to feel like I’m buying New Lincoln.”

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