Is going Between the Lines this time ‘round more like shooting fish in a barrel?  Let’s find out with the latest ad campaign from Lincoln, as covered by the Detroit Free Press:

Ford said today it is rolling out a new ad campaign for its Lincoln brand with the tagline “Smarter than Luxury,” and starring John Slattery, who portrays Roger Sterling in the TV series “Mad Men.”

There’s an ironic element there, considering the behind-the-scenes marketing dialogue seen on the TV show.  If the boffins at Lincoln chose “Smarter than Luxury” over everything else, I gotta know what they passed on.  Perhaps “Lincoln: Our Stuff Looks Like Poop Dung” was already under consideration for the Lincoln Log people. (Read More…)

When Alan Mulally took over at Ford and sold off Jaguar and Volvo, a few people (me included) wondered as follows:

Having “Ford” as a global brand is well enough, but how will they compete in the more profitable luxury market? (Read More…)

In the magical half-fortnight festival of full-size Fords known to all and sundry as Panther Appreciation Week, the most fortuitous things can occur for the True Believers. The obstacles before our durable front suspensions are laid low and the rough path is made smooth before the live axles of our minds, which is how I found myself rolling through New York Tuesday afternoon in a 2010 Town Car Signature L.

“Something happened a few years ago,” my driver, Leo, said. “They ain’t as good as they was.”

“I can explain why,” I said, and I meant it. But first, a word about wheelbase.

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Kudos to Baruth for having the stones to (re)join the Mehtas and countless other Pro-Panther families at the dark side: no small feat considering he’s a famous Audi/Porker racer extraordinare. Which points to a universal fact: it’s okay for car people to love the American Land Yacht, even if modern-day Detroit hopes we’d forget about the past. To that effect, check out two Lincoln Town Cars that often grace my driveway.

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As cars are becoming a commodity item, a rich Chinese (and there are a lot of them) needs something to set him apart from the riff-raff. Luxury cars are a booming business in the Middle Kingdom. In 2015, more than a million luxury cars are seen changing hands in China. The trouble is, nearly none of them are American. The Chinese luxury segment is all but exclusively dominated by German makes. China has become the world’s largest market for the Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedans. In the first eight months of the year, BMW sold more cars in China than in all of 2009. Audi is China’s volume leader in the luxury segment. And the Americans? (Read More…)

Today’s Detroit News has an interesting item on Ford’s D3/D4 platform strategy, based on the thesis that

The remade Taurus has emerged as a flagship for the Dearborn automaker, restoring luster to a nameplate that had become synonymous with “rental car,” and helping to revive an automaker that had become dependent on trucks and sport utility vehicles.

As Jack Baruth’s Capsule Review of the Ford Five Hundred shows, the D3 platform offers good space and comfort, and the recent update and return to the Taurus nameplate has been rewarded with steadily-increasing sales. And though the Taurus has fought back to become a Ford-brand flagship (likely at the expense of Mercury), its platform-mates have been consistent underperformers on the showroom floor. Flex has sold in the low 3k monthly range, while MKS and MKT have been thoroughly beaten in YTD sales by the Cadillac DTS and Escalade, themselves hardly the most competitive alternatives to the big Lincolns.

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Without Volvo, Ford sold 170,900 units last month, for a 15 percent increase compared to June 2009, when the industry was mired in one of its worst years ever. Compared to last month, Ford’s sales (like many other automakers’) were down considerably from their 196,671 unit level. That’s yet another indication of the market’s overall weakness, but Ford’s got its own special problems as well. Even after the announced death of Mercury, Lincoln is nosediving, failing to top its June 2009 number of 7,137 units. At 6,318 units, Ford sold fewer Lincolns last month than GM sold Tahoes. Ouch. Meanwhile, Mercury blithely outsold its fellow premium brand by a healthy margin, moving 9,250 units. Otherwise, the news at Ford was “steady.”

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I’m going down to Memphis

Where they really playin’ the blues

I’m going down on Beale Street

And have a good time like I choose

“Thank you for coming to Budget. I have you booked for a Kia Optima.”

“The hell you do.”

“That is a full-size car as you requested.”

“Well, in that case, I want something that is not a full-size car.” And that is how I came to be rolling through the proverbial Dirty South in a 2100-mile, 2010-model-year Town Car. Yes, they still make ‘em. The current lineup has been rationalized to Signature Limited (117-inch wheelbase) and Signature L (123-inch). There’s absolutely no reason of which I can think to take the SWB car, but that’s what the rental fleets have, and it’s what you can easily buy off-lease. I’ve found plenty of essentially identical two-year-old SigLims for under $20K, so this car is not only a direct used-price competitor for the 2009 Sable I reviewed previously, it’s also in the same ballpark as… a Kia Optima.

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March is shaping up to be the biggest month in car sales since Cash for Clunkers ended, and Ford isn’t being left behind [official release in PDF format here]. The firm’s sales rose 43 percent last month, matching February’s performance and setting another record for sales since 1984. Ford brand sales led the way with a 45.6 percent increase, while Lincoln climbed 18.9 percent and Mercury rose 26.2 percent. Focus hit 19,500 units, a 57.5 percent increase, while Fusion sales grew 79 percent to 22,773 units, an all-time record for the nameplate. Escape flirted with the 20k mark as well at 19,182, while F-Series hit 42,514, a 30 percent increase. Explorer even saw a 78 percent bump to 5,907, and a 53 percent bump in fleet sales sent over 10,000 Econolines out the door. Lincoln sold 450 more MKZs than it did last March, otherwise only the Town Car and Navigator were up (modestly). Milan carried the Mercury brand, up 71 percent to 3,897 units. Grand Marquis and Mariner sold 3,532 and 2,482 respectively. Though Ford had a great month sales-wise, its luxury brand situation continues to be one hot, steaming mess.

Ford already sells a Ford Fusion Hybrid and a Mercury Milan Hybrid, but according to the Detroit News, a Lincoln MKZ Hybrid is en route as well, giving Ford a hybrid model for each of its three brands. Too bad they’re all the same model. As Jim Hall of 2953 Analytics points out: (Read More…)

If Lincoln were a person, it would have been committed to a psych ward years ago. Battered by corporate politics, economic cycles, and a desire to both retain traditional customers and conquest new ones, the brand has lacked a coherent identity for over a quarter-century. There have been times when each of its models was the product of a different strategy and expressed (or failed to express) a different design language. In the early 2000s Lincoln seemed to finally be getting its shit together, with a brilliant Continental Concept and a common design language applied to all of its 2003 models. Then the wheels came off the wagon—again—and a bankruptcy-skirting Ford had no choice but to cancel the ambitious cars in the PAG pipeline and redo Lincoln on the cheap. Did they spend their pennies well? What is a Lincoln in 2010? There’s no better place to find out than the driver’s seat of the current flagship, the MKS EcoBoost.
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It’s a little-known fact that nearly half of the 2,000 or so dealer franchises that GM began winding down during bankruptcy were Cadillac stores, most of them located in rural areas. The General’s plan was to focus Cadillac’s dealer network on  standalone stores in major metropolitan areas, following the strategies of more premium luxury competitors like BMW and Lexus. But having marked 922 largely small-town Caddy dealers for death, GM saw 2009 sales of its luxury brand fall 15 percent, or twice the rate of Buick and Chevrolet in the same period. The lesson: small-town Cadillac dealers (like attempts to sell the brand in Europe) are worthwhile after all. Automotive News [sub] reports, the majority of those dealers being reinstated are small-town Cadillac dealers. Will Cadillac’s brand integrity suffer by having to serve the small-town American market as well as competing with the European brands? Probably, but at least Caddy dealers can take heart knowing that things could still be worse: they could be Lincoln-Mercury dealers.

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With news that Mercury will receive new product based on the forthcoming Ford Focus, the bandwagon to crown Ford as the new King of Detroit has halted briefly as its passengers take a moment to remember: oh yeah, Ford is technically still trying to compete in the luxury game. Ford’s recent luxury-brand efforts have been so half-hearted in comparison with its Ford-brand turnaround that many analysts simply overlook Lincoln and Mercury when proclaiming Dearborn’s momentum. As, apparently, have consumers. Neither Lincoln nor Mercury cracked 100k sales units in 2009, a feat achieved even by such marginal luxury brands as Buick, Cadillac, and Acura. And as the Detroit News details, the problems with Lincoln-Mercury run deep, and their solutions are far from obvious.

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When GM axed four brands in bankruptcy, it seemed for one bright, shining moment that the era of America’s auto brand bloat was drawing to a close. No such luck. Both Chrysler and Ford passed up opportunities to hack off purposeless brands, and in doing so perpetuated some of the worst examples of brand engineering surviving in the US market. If there were one brand that needed the hatchet, it is and was Mercury. Now, after a decade of Jill Wagner-supplied life support, Ford is breaking the silence surrounding its entry-luxe brand, announcing that a Mercury-badged vehicle will be built “on the same platform” as the new Ford Focus. Put simply: the Mercury Tracer is coming back.
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