Here's Why the Lincoln Continental Is an Underrated Luxury Sedan

this is a 2018 Lincoln cotton it'll black label and it is a luxury sedan in the traditional sense of the term this thing doesn't try to be a luxury car in a family car and an off-roader in a sports car all wrapped up into one instead this is just a traditional old-school luxury sedan where the primary focus is luxury and comfort today I'm gonna show you around it I've borrowed this cut metal black label from Lincoln South Coast here in Orange County California they're a beautiful brand-new Lincoln dealership with all of the latest Lincoln models all of which are surprisingly better than you probably think Lincoln has been reinvented with a lot of great luxury cars and this is the flagship sedan in the lineup specifically this trim level the Black Label this one is a sticker price of just under $75,000 but it's missing two things that most flagship luxury sedans have for one thing there's no v8 instead this car offers a choice between three different v6 is all between 305 and 400 horsepower this one has a 335 horsepower twin turbo v6 if you opt for the 400 horsepower version it is the most powerful Lincoln ever made but yet it's still a v6 the other thing that this doesn't have that you might expect from a full-size luxury sedan is rear-wheel drive the base level Continental is front-wheel drive although upscale versions like this one are all-wheel drive still it isn't the rear-wheel drive you would traditionally expect from full-sized American luxury sedan and yet this car has a lot of stuff you'd precisely expect from a full-sized American luxury sedan like luxury and presence and a smooth comfortable ride and interior so today I'm going to take you on a tour of the Continental Black Label and I'm going to show you all the quirks and features of Lincoln's flagship luxury sedan then I'm gonna get it out on the road and drive it and then I'm gonna give it a dug score and for more of my thoughts on the Continental Black Label click the link below to visit autotrader.com slash oversteer where I've also rounded up a list of the cheapest used luxury sedans currently listed for sale on auto trader now let's start with one of my favorite quirks of the cut metal and that would be the door handles now if you take a look at the doors you'll notice there aren't really door handles anywhere on the outside like in a normal car so how do you get in this thing well Lincoln has hidden the door handles inside the chrome trim along the windows the door handles are these little hoops that come off of it you stick your finger in here pull and then there's an electronic mechanism that unlatches the door that is a pretty cool trick also another cool item and the vicinity of the door handle right above it there's a little icon that lets you know if your door is locked or unlocked check this out if it's fully red that means your door is locked if it's unlocked a portion of the red kind of goes away looking like a lock that has been unlocked and that is ingenious and even better if the icon is unlocked and you have the key in your pocket you walk up and cap it then that locks the doors and you can see that the icon changes from unlocked to locked and that is pretty cool if you want to unlock it you just put your hand inside the hoop for the door handle and then you can see when you pull on the door that the icon turns to unlocked now another cool item right above that icon you can see there's this little keypad with numbers on it here's the theory there if you're going out to like Swim or something you don't wanna bring your key with you because you'll destroy it you can lock your key in the car cap a little code that you have set with that keypad and then it locks the doors when you're done swimming come back to your continental type in your code and it unlocks the door so you don't have to bring your key with you and that is brilliant only Ford's have that in Lincoln's and it is a brilliant idea that I wish every automaker was able to adopt it next up we move inside the Continental where there are a couple of interesting items to note but I want to start with the interior now first off this interior is just absolutely beautiful and I mean that Lincoln wasn't always a bastion of gorgeous contours but this is totally different the interior this car is just fantastic look for instance at the door panel you have this gorgeous wood trim nice stitching look at these speakers this is what you'd expect from a really high-end luxury car take a look at the seats the perforated leather and how about these cushions that sort of come off the seat back so they can be adjusted in a million different ways and then there's the Lincoln logo embroidered into the headrest same story with the dashboard and all of the controls everything is just beautiful now on the side Directive interiors it's worth noting you might think this interior is white but you see Lincoln doesn't really do interior colors on its black label bottles instead they have three interior themes that you can choose from this one is the chalet theme I believe because it's white so it's supposed to like conjure up images of a ski chalet there's also thoroughbred which is brown and black and sort of saddle brown it's supposed to remind you of like horse racing and then there's Rhapsody which is blue and it's supposed to look like a cool jazz club or something so you don't choose interior colors with the black labels you choose theme now call the interior color whatever you want frankly it doesn't really matter to me and like I said there are some absolutely beautiful touches in this interior and there is some cool sort of interesting luxury features that you don't get in most normal cars and even a lot of high-end luxury cars for instance take a look at this there's the thigh support in the front of the seats and that moves forward and backwards a lot of cars do that but in this car you can choose to move the right and left forward or backward individually so if your right leg is out on a long drive your left leg is back you can only extend the right thigh support that's something you won't see in basically any other vehicle in speaking of seat controls how about the fact that the headrest is controlled by power operation on the doors just like a lot of cars mercedes-benz but unlike most cars where you can only put the headrest up or down in this car you can also move it forward or backwards so you can move the headrest just the headrest four different ways to cater to your individual seat sitting preferences next up another interesting interior detail in this car has a push button gear lever and moves the big bulky gear lever out of the center console to free up space in here and it moves two buttons to the left of the infotainment screen now the interesting thing about these push buttons is if you push it for example from park to drive press D and you can see it lights up all of the little gears it goes through on the way just like an old-school gear lever same if you go into sport it lights them all up even if you go back into park same deal it lights up drive neutral and reverse along the way before hitting park next up we move on to the door now like I mentioned the latch on the outside has an electronic release it's not an old mechanical handle that you pull you just kind of pull a button and then it releases electronically and so on the inside there's also an electronic or so you simply push a button on the door panel and the door opens but what if the electronics fail what if your battery dies well there is also a manual release located sort of out of sight further down in the door panel you can pull that and then a mechanical latch unlatches the door just like in a regular car the next step on a move on to the climate controls and those of you who are not a fan of infotainment screens for everything we'll be happy to know that Lincoln has kept traditional buttons and switches and dials for the climate controls in this car so you don't have to go into the infotainment screen to basically adjust the climate control however you still can there's a redundancy you can go in the infotainment screen or use the traditional buttons do whichever one you prefer now there are a couple of interesting things in the climate controls one is that the center is this sort of nice big silver button it feels nice to touch and that is what adjusts the amount of air that comes out it's sort of the most important focal point of the climate controls and then you also have of course heated seats and cooled seats and these nice-looking buttons to the left and right unfortunately you cannot turn them both on at the same time you must choose between heated and cooled you can't be getting heated and cooled at once come on Lincoln where's the luxury of that now next up we move on to the gauge cluster screen where there are a couple of interesting items first I should know I mentioned before this car has a drive gear D and also has a sport gear s if you want like a sporty or driving experience fine but there's a feature in the gauge cluster screen called drive control you go into drive control and you can choose to make the handling in Drive sporty and then you can choose to make the handling in sport normal and suddenly you've made Drive sportier than sport and then you can go in and choose performance in sport and put that at normal too so now suddenly drive has more of a sporty characteristic than sport based on your selections I'm not sure why it allows you to choose this way but if you feel Sport is too sporty and drive is not sporty enough well you can change that here's another cool thing this car has a remote starter on the key you press the remote Start button twice and it will remote start if you want to for instance warm it up on a cold day outside your house before you get inside and go to work here's the really cool thing though there's a climate control setting for the remote starter where you can choose to have it be auto or last set and if it's Auto that means the car will read the outside and inside temperature and automatically turn on the climate control so that it will be perfect when you climb inside if it's very cold it'll turn on warm if it's hot it'll turn it on cool and that is a very cool idea next we move on to the infotainment screen or there are a couple of interesting quirks now this is Ford the latest sync system just sort of adapted for Lincoln so I covered some of this stuff when I reviewed the brand-new Mustang but I've unearthed a couple of other interesting items for example there's a feature called eco time penalty and if you select eco time penalty it may send you on a longer route if you have the navigation system on just to conserve fuel but doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose if you have to go like four miles out of your way because there's a lot of down hills and you can save three miles per gallon doesn't that kind of negate saving the three miles per gallon in the first place I don't really know but you can turn that on if you want to go on the most economical possible next up we go into sound settings there's an item in there that gives you the option to play revel experience obviously I have no idea what that means so I click for more information it says it will play an audio experience that demonstrates the capabilities of your vehicle's audio system so you click on it you allow the car to play it and it plays like a musical piece that is designed to bring out the finest quality is in the Lincoln Continental sound system [Music] this is sort of like the demo mode in case you want to hear just how good your revels sound system can be I wonder if anyone's ever press that outside of a test drive oh no Jim you got to hear my rebel sound system here here I'm gonna play this and you're gonna hear it and you're gonna want one of these trust me and next up we move into display settings and there's an option here for display brightness but when I go to adjust the display brightness you can see nothing really happens on the screen you can actually see something a little bit happens but with my eyes you can see that anything happens even though there's like a long slider for adjustments here so I hope you like the display brightness how it already is next up in the infotainment screen there's an item in there for the multi-contour seats if you click on that you have several more seat options than the many options you already have on the seat controls on the door panel this is kind of odd because as you touch these things the seats instantly change to do whatever you're touching it's very weird to touch something on a screen and then kind of feel your butt move because the seat is changing you don't see this in a lot of cars but it's kind of a neat touch these seats can be moved in like an infinite number of ways and next up there's an app called Sirius XM travel link you click on it and it gives you a bunch of different options like movie times it also gives you ski conditions you click on that to middle summer you can see that the local ski resort is 84 degrees it is closed it has zero inches of snow it is zero inches of average base zero inches of depth no lifts open and this is my favorite no recent grooming sorry ski people you'll have to get the full ski experience from the comfort of your Chalet interior another cool tech feature the heads-up display constantly projects the speed limit onto the windshield right next to the speed you're traveling so that you could always check to see if you're speeding that's a good idea next up we move under the hood and there's something particularly interesting up here it's just a twin turbo v6 like you see in a lot of cars one thing I like is the fact that you can see there are still these little plastic stickers over the Lincoln badges on the engine cover I just want to pull it off so badly but I will resist because this is a new car and I want that joy to be saved for the first owner next up I want to talk headlights now if you look closely here you can see the headlights these like five vertical bulbs in them and they look very futuristic and nothing like an old boring traditional headlight but that isn't the coolest part to me if you look all the way down at the bottom of the bumper you can see the fog lights also have these vertical bulbs too and they look even cooler most automakers don't devote any time or energy or money into making their fog lights look cool but that's exactly what Lincoln has done with the cotton metal and I think it contributes to a really cool front-end look in this car next we move on to the mirrors which in most cars are usually not particularly noteworthy but in this car they are for a couple of reasons one is this cool chrome trim that goes along the bottom of the mirror is it has a very nice upscale look to it but even more upscale than that is this brushed aluminum finish at the base of the mirror where the mirror connects to the door usually this is just some cheap crappy plastic even in nice luxury cars but in this thing even though you'll never see it or never notice it it's a lot nicer than that it looks really good this is the kind of little touch you expect from a high-end luxury car next up continuing the quirks and features around the back of the Continental now this is one of those cars where if you have the key in your pocket and you sort of hold your foot underneath the bumper the trunk will open now I always make fun of these systems because they never seem to work but in the Continental I found that it works every single time I try and I stick my foot under there opens I stick my foot under there it closes it's like they finally have refined this to the point where you can actually use it and it works Wow now once you're in the trunk you will discover something surprising which is that it's absolutely huge the Continental is nowhere near as large as the old school town cars with their giant trunks but the trunk does look to be about that big you could stick anything back here it's surprisingly large for a car of this size and finally we move on to the back of the Continental there's something particularly interesting or quirky back here but I will say I am really impressed with the fact that the rear seats are just as luxurious as the front they have the same beautiful perforated leather the same Lincoln badge embroidered on the tiny the little hand-stitched headrests you have the same gorgeous door panels the wood trim the speakers everything is absolutely beautiful in the back seat there's also a lot of legroom the front seat is where I would sit and obviously I have no problem sitting back here it's a very nice place to spend time it's also worth noting even the rear seats have the electronic door release like in front you press the little button and then the doors pop right open now interestingly there's no manual release for the rear seats so if the battery dies you're sitting in back I guess you have to climb up to the front and then pull the manual release in order to get out because you won't be getting out of the rear seats using the electronic door popper and so those are the quirks and features of the Lincoln Continental Black Label now it's time to get it out on the road and drive it all right driving of the Continental Lincoln's flagship luxury sedan first impression it is as it says it would be very smooth very relaxed very comfortable this car is by no means high-strung even though use a twin turbo engine so you think no you can drive it very comfortably if you'd like the thing that you realize at first one you get in this car is it just everything is very comfortable and everything is very nice the interior surprisingly high-end considering I mean when I think of a full-size luxury sedan I think of a 7 Series or an s-class that have you know giant interiors and cost a hundred thousand dollars this is sort of a wrong or two below those but everything is still very beautiful in this car there's more plastic than you would find on an s-class or cemetery's but it's also a lot cheaper and it's still very nice there's a lot of stitching a lot of good materials a lot of nice colors acceleration is good just stepped on it they're sort of mid-range um it's fine it doesn't feel you're gonna fly down the road like you're in some sports car it gives you ample supple power but but not enough that you're gonna be like whew that's not the point of this vehicle I will say that the trim sort of around the climate controls and the infotainment screen there's more plastic on there than you might want some of it is nice I mean there's plastic mixed in like chrome aluminum you know gauges and switches those look good but there's there's a little bit more plastic on there that I would want at this price point driving position as good visibility is good the mirrors are unusually small which I'm surprised about in a car like this because it's you know a luxury sedan and big car big trunk you think you'd have big mirrors to kind of complement it but they're actually kind of unusually small but you can see pretty well and there's obviously these modern detection things get blind spot in monitoring you get Lane keep assist and stuff so the days of needing giant mirrors aren't as important as they once were I really do like the steering wheel in this car there's no crappy plastic anywhere and the buttons are plastic but other than that everything is very nice it's all leather and chrome and well stitched even the center and that's a big component to me I get a lot of the luxury cars that I'm very nice steering wheels in the center it's still plastic when their argument is well you don't touch it yeah but you see it but in this car it's like stitched leather it's very nice coming up to a stoplight and it almost feels like the motors not even on you just don't you don't hear much very very quiet the cooled seat works on you really well that's a good thing yeah the steering is good the steering is actually more precise than I would expect it feels a little bit more connected and less vague than I think certainly less vague than like Lexus ES and those kind of cars in terms of the handling the car is big it definitely kind of has a little bit more of a of a bode feel to it it certainly doesn't feel like a boat like the 80s versions of these cars but it's it's not you know this car is not intended to be a sports car they're not trying to do that and you can tell that when you start going around a corner the steering is more precise than I was expecting but the car still body rolls and stuff it's best when kind of being piloted smoothly which is the intent and so that's the Lincoln Continental Black Label this is not an e63 AMG in the sense that it's a luxury car that's also a sporty car it's not a Volvo v90 in the sense that it's a luxury car it's also a family wagon this isn't a Mercedes G wagon in the sense that it's a luxury car it's also an off-roader instead this is just a plain luxury car and it's damn good at it and now it's time to give it a dug score starting with the weekend categories in styling the Continental is nice but a bit bland it gets a six out of ten acceleration is good at 5.5 seconds 0 to 60 and that gives it a 5 out of 10 handling is only fine steering is light and luxurious it's no sports car and it gets a 4 out of 10 fun factor is low it's fast enough that it handles okay but it's not designed for fun and it gets a 4 out of 10 cool factor is the same this is the new flagship Lincoln sedan but buyers are all about SUVs these days so it gets a 4 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 23 out of 50 next up for the daily category is starting with features the Continental is loaded with lots of equipment but it doesn't move the game forward with any new innovations and it gets an 8 out of 10 Comfort is excellent especially at this price point make it's an 8 out of 10 quality is good the interior is gorgeous with only a few drawbacks and it gets an 8 out of 10 practicality is typical for cars in this segment and it gets a 5 out of 10 finally value I think the mid-range Continental models are a better value than the Black Label for the $75,000 this one costs it's hard not to want a v8 in a rear-wheel drive platform I also worry about resale there have already been talks about cancelling the Continental in favor of more SUVs from Lincoln it gets a 6 out of 10 for a total daily score of 35 out of 50 add it up in the Doug score is 58 out of 100 which places it here just behind the Cadillac ct-6 and the genesis G 90 the Continental is a great sedan and it's definitely underrated but it's a bit pricey and sedans seem to be going out of style fast keep it on your shopping list but negotiate a big discount [Music] you

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 2,557,481

Rating: 4.8318491 out of 5

Keywords: lincoln continental, 2018 lincoln continental, lincoln continental review, 2018 lincoln continental review, continental, continental review, new lincoln continental review, new continental review, new lincoln continental, new lincoln, new lincoln sedan, lincoln sedan review, luxury sedan review, 2019 lincoln continental, doug demuro, demuro

Id: YB0QQfU1K1M

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/jconley4297]

I have no idea how keyless entry hasn't caught on yet, my mom's old '02 Windstar had it

[u/Aiels]

/u/Doug-DeMuro When you show the HUD that shows the speed limit, you pass a 40mph sign, but the HUD stays at 50!

Literally undriveable

[u/SlantedStars]

Those 30 way seats are hella tempting

[u/huhwhat90]

As an aside, I really like that Lincoln is going back to actual names instead of that alpha-numeric bullcrap. Continental, Aviator and Nautilus just scream classic American luxury.

[u/kobrons]

Hey Doug just a FYI. The way these automated tailgates work is that they're able to sense your leg across the whole rear bumper.
To make sure that you really want to open the tailgate the correct movement is a kick without hitting the car because that sliding movement might just be you walking past the car. And you obviously have to have the key with you ore somewhere behind the cat.
The reason why it worked this time is because the sliding movement was fast enough for it to think that it was a kick.

[u/FireflyOD]

The big missing feature on this car is suicide doors. As nice as it is, there isn’t anything that distinguishes it from other cars in its class.

[u/kshebdhdbr]

Am I the only one who doesnt like the manual backups for the doors? Like, why? Just make the main handle manual so you dont need 2 ways to open a door.

[u/Loki240SX]

Hi /u/Doug-Demuro, quick comment on the doors. While the driver's door is only one with an emergency latch, the other three have capacitors that allow you to pop open the door for up to 36 hours after losing the battery. So you don't need to worry about getting trapped in the back.

[u/wvgarage]

Its a nice car (especially the seats!) but I think people are probably going to look at other luxury sedans before they look at this. As Matt Farah said, Lincoln needs a car like the Chrysler 300 if they're looking to boost sales.