2005 Lincoln Town Car - At Your Service

 

I can't imagine executives at Ford where doing chest bumps when they realized they had the "service" industry all to themselves after 1996 but with GM out of the business, they had a fleet car for almost any purpose; with no real competition. Limousines, taxi, police departments, rentals. Hearses. Our subject is a  2005 Lincoln Town car - one of three Ford sedans that lived on for while, actually, quite a while, after GM moved on.

 

 

Like its General Motors counterpart, of which I always though superior both in design and performance, the Lincoln Town car was a robust automobile that while certainly no track star, was a vehicle perfect for the service industry. What with it's body on frame design, when damaged in an accident, they were much more reasonable to repair compared to a unit body automobile. And when you had a lot of them on hand, you bang up one and you can pull parts from another one. Even across model lines in the case of the Mercury Grand Marquis and the Town Car which were all but the same except for badging and front grills after 2003. The Ford Crown Victoria became exclusively a fleet automobile after 2008.

 

 

As to who would buy one of these for personal use, well, that's a different story. Even when the platform or chassis the Town Car was first introduced back in 1979, something that was code named, "Panther", the Lincoln name meant "old". Only the most stalwart of folks who could care less about what people thought would spring for one these - or they were holding onto the age old belief that a "Lincoln"  actually meant something.
 

 

Ford's updates to the Town Car over the years did little to shift any paradigms and if anything exasperated the oldster image; as much as they changed it, remarkably it stayed the same. Rather quickly, and in particular after GM left Ford alone to the market, these cars came to be nothing more than "service". Nice, comfortable, reassuring service but service nonetheless. 

What could, would, should they have done? It's easy to arm chair quarterback but the cold hard reality of what Lincoln, and Cadillac for that matter, faced and still face to a great degree can't. Be. Fixed. And they know it too. For certain, the instant brands like Lexus came ashore and BMW and Mercedes somehow were able to push out a myriad of less expensive makes and models that helped bolster their brand, there was no way Lincoln stood a chance. And they tried for years and failed every time. Had they been producing what the imports brought ashore beforehand would it have made a difference? Probably? But we'll never know for sure.

 

 

Eventually, even the fleet industry changed moving away cars towards far more practical cross over utility vehicles and minivans. That pushed grand dad here back into a corner with literally no place to go. Ford pulled the plug not only on the Lincoln Town Car but the platform it was based on after 2011.