Lincoln said last year that it was going electricwith four new EVs by 2030, starting with one this year. On Monday, Lincoln gave its first glimpse of what it could look like.
Well, what the concept might look like, at least, as Lincoln says it plays to unveil the full car on April 20. Lincoln says that the concept “serves as inspiration for the brand’s fully electric vehicles coming in the near future,” which means that the concept will be the template for Lincoln’s EVs, for better or worse. (You can watch the full 16-second teaser here if you so desire.)
Details beyond that are pretty sparse, though it’s likely that Lincoln’s EVs will share a whole lot with the Ford Mustang Mach-E, in composition if not in style. That is not, originally, how this was supposed to go, after Lincoln said in January 2020 that it would be working on an EV with Rivian, before, a few months later, with the world in a pandemic grip, saying that it was not. The cancellation made history, of sorts, being the first such vehicle project cancelled specifically because of COVID.
Almost two years later, Lincoln appears to have well moved on, and probably for the better, as Rivian has struggled with production issues, though through little fault of its own.
Lincoln’s first EV, at any rate, should get here later this year and is still likely to be some kind of SUV, just as it was with Rivian back then, and should count among its competition cars like the Tesla Model X, the Jaguar I-Pace, the Cadillac Lyriq, the Audi E-Tron, and the BMW iX, in a luxury electric SUV market that all of the sudden is beginning to have quite a lot of competition. That is, if you’re in the mood for a big heavy SUV that costs around $70,000. Sooner or later, automakers might even have to differentiate them a bit more, instead of saying that, you know, this is their first time doing an EV, so try to cut it some slack.
Lincoln should also, at least, take this as an opportunity to remake itself, like what Cadillac is doing. American luxury could use the boost.