If a Lincoln starts every time, does anyone care?

June 22, 2007 - By John LeBlanc

OTTAWA - Amid the maelstrom of activity surrounding the Ford Motor Co’s ongoing Way Forward turnaround plan, a recently released J.D. Power and Associates Initial Quality Study must have seemed like a smorgasbord to a starving man.

Four Ford products—Ford Mustang, Mercury Milan (not sold in Canada), Lincoln MKZ and Lincoln Mark LT—came first in their segments in this year's report that tracks problems experienced by owners during the first 90 days of ownership.

Perhaps most encouraging was Lincoln’s rise from 12th place last year to third. Only Porsche and Lexus finished higher. For Ford’s flagship domestic luxury brand that’s desperate to get back on luxury car buyers’ lists, no doubt, this was welcome news.

Nonetheless, the report begs the question: who cares? 

The truth is, after years of neglect from parent Ford, plus a string of unfulfilled concept cars riding the coattails of the mid-Sixties Continental, Lincoln is a brand that flatlines the relevance metre for anyone born in the last four decades. It wouldn’t surprise many if the average age of a Lincoln customer was “deceased.” And in this age of global brands, outside of North America, a Lincoln is virtually unsellable.

Reliable, newer Lincolns may be; but are they relevant?

Porsche 1, Detroit 0, film at 11

We’re months away from the start of the new car show season (Frankfurt, September, be there), but Porsche’s recent decision to skip next January’s Detroit auto show may be a harbinger of things to come for the show itself and the industry as a whole.

When the Los Angeles auto show moved to its new November dates (it previously was the week before the Detroit show), it opened the door for import brands and environmentally friendly vehicles to get some media love in the oh-so-trendy California market. Porsche substantiates this by citing their decision to drop Detroit was to reduce its trade show appearances in favour of more direct contact with customers where they sell the majority of their cars in the U.S.: the east and west coasts.

What Porsche won’t say is that Cobo Hall, where the Detroit show is annually held, has long been criticized for being too small for carmakers to properly display their wares. And based on the current state of the Michigan economy (i.e. bad, and getting worse) plans for a new and larger venue are merely pipe dreams.

Don’t be surprised if other carmakers follow Porsche’s lead. The Los Angeles show becoming a place for import and environmentally friendly debuts, and the Detroit show focusing even more on domestic and performance cars.

Ford: “We don’t need no steenking hatches!”

Unless you’ve had your head under a Trabant for the last few years, you have to know the sub-compact market is hotter than a rear-ended Ford Pinto. But if a report from Inside Line, at edmunds.com, is correct, the Dearborn automaker may be making a similar blunder with their latest small car plans.

Given the above information, Ford’s jettisoning of the five-door and wagon iterations from the revamped compact Focus lineup coming this November seems like poor planning.

But, Martin Smith, Ford’s design chief of Europe mollified hatchback fans with confirmation back in March at the Geneva auto show of the company’s plans to bring the next generation subcompact Fiesta over to the North American market for 2009.

Except now comes news that instead of the expected three- and five-door hatchbacks, we’ll be getting a small sedan (think first-gen Toyota Echo). Apparently, it could be several years before North Americans receive the hatchbacks that shares an existing platform with the just-released Mazda2.

- John LeBlanc is an Ottawa-based automotive critic and publisher of straight-six.com.