1995 LINCOLN CONTINENTAL Review - Base Price $41,375
The all-new Continental gains ground gracefully
Introduction
After five years of yeoman service in a segment where Ford hadn't played previously - front- drive luxury cars - and five years of new Japanese competition, the Lincoln Continental has been jettisoned in favor of a new entry: a vehicle with a different worldview.
The 6-cylinder giant economy car that was the Lincoln Continental has been replaced by an entirely new luxury automobile, one with the same moniker but a new transverse DOHC V8 engine, a new transaxle, a much trimmer body design, and a visually exciting and incredibly talented dashboard and instrument panel.
Lincoln-Mercury product planners and marketing executives flatly state that their goal was to create the best front-drive luxury car in the world and, further, that the new Continental measures up to their goals.
This is a pretty ambitious assertion. Even with the front-drive proviso, which limits direct comparisons with the superb Lexus LS 400, the Continental will still be measured against the more powerful Cadillac Seville and Seville STS, as well as the bigger Cadillac DeVille and Concours.
So it's hard for us to endorse Lincoln's best-in-class position. But it's easy to call the new Continental better than the car it replaces. It's smoother, it's far more powerful and it offers a level of electronic sophistication that few luxury vehicles can match.
Our model, with aluminum wheels and a 6-disc CD player located not in the trunk but in the console, had an estimated price of $42,125.
Interior
From door panel to door panel, the Lincoln Continental has been designed around comfortable, upright seats.
And the instruments are gorgeous; they employ a display technique called "virtual image" that projects the instrument faces onto a black field containing the orange moving needles. This gives the main pod a crisp 3-D effect. Also, the Continental's steering wheel has lighted redundant controls for the sound system and cruise control.
Included in the dash is a dot-matrix menu with selection buttons for ride control and steering assist, and the on/off controls for automatic door locks, reverse mirrors that lower for parking, lock confirmation beep, express-down driver window and a host of other interesting features.
The electronic topper to all this is that the individual preferences for steering, ride, seat position, outside mirrors and each of the menu items can be saved in memory as the preferences of two different drivers. Hit the key fob, the keyless entry pad or the special buttons on the driver's door and all of the saved settings are applied. Change any setting and the car will ask if you wish to save the new setting or revert to the old one.
We should add that Lincoln has an answer for prospective owners who don't number computer programming among their personal skills. Lincoln sales consultants will walk you through the intricacies of the Continental's Memory Profile System or, if you like, preset the system to your tastes. However, we'd characterize the system as user-friendly, and doubt that anyone will have much difficulty with it after their first run-through.
The Continental comes with its own umbrella and drying case, and there are some interesting options, including a cargo organizer and cart installed in the trunk, and a voice-activated, hands-free cellular telephone that plays through the stereo system.
The leather, fabrics and surfaces in the cabin of the Continental are first-rate, with a solid, rich feeling throughout. The swoops and angles inside blend well with the modernistic mixture of analog and digital readouts, and it begins to feel at last like a $40,000 car should feel.
Walk-Around
The body shell of the Continental is a great deal stronger and stiffer than the old car's, a situation that can lead to quiet ride and brilliant suspension if it's all done right. In the Continental, they have come very close to an ideal setup. The problem we see with the new car is the 4-window roof - not as open and airy as the 6-window roof on the old car - and the evolutionary front- and rear-end designs, which make the Continental look more like a standard sedan than a luxury car.
Up front, the new design echoes the distinctive theme of the Lincoln Mark VIII, and a curved character line running the length of the car is an eye-pleasing update of the slab-sided appearance of the previous Continental. But though it's pretty, it's also conservative and a bit bland - a car with a lovely personality but not much presence.
Better news is the 260-hp V8 engine that replaces the 170-hp V6. This 4.6-liter V8, a distant relative of the engine in the rear-drive Mark VIII coupe, is bristling with technology, including all-aluminum construction and lots of plastic accessories, but its best feature is its power, which will yank the car from rest to 60 mph in about 8 seconds. That is competitive with the best American and Japanese luxury sedans available.
The all-new Continental has kept a lot of the good stuff, such as an electronic, self-leveling air spring with three levels of ride control, and three levels of rack-and-pinion, power-steering assist.
The Continental also has a system called "multiplex electronics," where each major feature of the car is run by a module, and all of the modules interact to get the car down the road, communicating with each other many times per second. And the car maintains a wealth of safety equipment, including standard dual airbags, electronic all-speed traction control featuring braking and engine intervention, and anti-lock brakes.
Impressions
Ford suspension engineers have given the Continental a beautifully taut, quiet ride based on air-spring technology the company has been refining for more than a decade. The Continental uses German-made struts with electronic-control modules that adjust the suspension through plush, normal and firm ranges. The ride automatically reverts to firm whenever the road inputs dictate a switch, with the process completed in just milliseconds.
The steering, which we liked best in the low-assist mode, gives the front-drive Continental a very beefy, glued-down feel. This big luxury car astounded us with its sure-footedness on a drive through the hills of the Virginia horse country south of Washington, D.C. Only when you get going really fast does the Continental's 3900 lb. really show up, along with an industrial grade of understeer.
Understeer is car-speak for a vehicle's tendency to resist directional change, and it's a universal trait among front-drive cars. What it means, in a nutshell, is that the faster you attempt to drive the car through a turn, the more it wants to go straight ahead.
In the Continental's case, this trait is consistent and wholly predictable - no nasty surprises if you decide to apply the brakes in the middle of a corner, for example.
Summary
The rather bland looking Lincoln Continental, although it is an extremely capable car, has to make an impression in a sea of cars that includes Acura, Audi, BMW, Cadillac, Infiniti and Lexus.
It does succeed on some counts: For example, all of these other makes offer unique features but come nowhere near the electronic wizardry of the Continental.
And even when you get past the bells and whistles, there is an excellent, quick, luxury sedan with a smooth ride and performance features that make it more entertaining than most. Best in class? Probably not. A much-improved vehicle? Most definitely.
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