Given it's been forty-three years since one of these downsized and unloved Continental Mark VI's left Lincoln-Mercury showrooms, and these aren't exactly car show darlings, imagine my surprise when I saw this '83 sinking into the glue-like mud at the Cleveland Pull-A-Part a couple of weeks back.
Unlike the 1978 Mark V that's less than fifty yards north, this "VI" still has her distinctive trunk lid. The hump-on-the-trunk was then Ford senior executive vice president Lee Iacocca's idea when designers first presented the Ford management team with what would become the 1969 Mark III. Frankly, Lido may get more credit for the idea than he was due considering the 1956 and 1957 Continental Mark II's had a hump, albeit vestigial compared later iterations.
Give him all the credit for the Rolls Royce inspired front grill that adorned all Mark IIIs to Mark VIII's. These cars were "Continental Marks" through 1985 and not branded as Lincolns, that changed in 1986 when they became known as Lincoln Marks.
The Continental Mark VI had literally and figuratively big brake shoes to fill when they went on sale in the fall of 1979. The Continental Mark V was the best-selling Mark of all time with Lincoln moving more than 70,000 of them each year from 1977 to 1979. More than 228,000 in all V's sold with big, fat, sweet profit margins. Not bad for what was little more than a freshened up 1972 to 1976 Continental Mark IV, itself little more than a '72 to '76 Ford Thunderbird in a tuxedo. Or, depending on your point of view, dressed up as a hooker.
To the degree that semantics or facts actually matter these days, Lincoln actually sold more Continental IV's than they did V's. However, the IV was sold over four-years as opposed to the V's three and never had a single sales year as good as any of the V's.
I hypothesize that sales of the Mark V were as good as they were due to General Motors downsizing all their full-size cars, except for the front-wheel-drive "E-body" Cadillac Eldorado and Oldsmobile Toronado, in 1977; the Cadillac Eldorado, which was, technically the Mark's arch-rival, got the shrink-ray in 1979. The Mark IV and V, though, always outsold the big and funky, front-wheel-drive Caddy. That would all change once Lincoln put these smaller boats in the water. Not that the Ford Motor Company wanted to, but with government mandated fuel-economy standards getting increasingly stringent, they had no choice.
Seeing the success of the Continental Mark V, you can't blame the Ford Motor Company for recycling every styling cue from the V onto the new-for-1980 VI's, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. Problem was, and this is where things get milky, said smaller styling cues that made the V what it was became cheesy, tacky and even more contrived on the VI.
Meanwhile Cadillac's clean-sheet, new-for-1979 smaller Eldorado had nothing in common with the barge it replaced yet, arguably, oozed more "Cadillac". Through 1985, the Eldorado clobbered the Continental Mark at the box office.
From 1980 through 1983, Lincoln sold less than half the number of Mark VI's than they did V's; and that was over a four-year run not three. Those VI sales figures included the four-door versions.
I would have gotten more pictures, even popped one of her doors open and shot around inside her, but this mud out here was so thick I thought it would suck me in down to my waist like a quicksand scene out of some horror movie. Can't be too careful out there.
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