Having said everything I needed to when I recently blogged about that 1979 Lincoln Continental Town Car, I wasn't planning to write about this 1979 Town Coupe that popped up in my Facebook feed the other day. But with just 12,000 miles showing on its 47-year-old analog odometer—and the fact that it's a two-door—how could I resist?
The asking price is $25,000. That's serious money for a seriously big car. In fact, this was the biggest car Lincoln ever sold and the largest domestic automobile you could buy in 1979.
It's so enormous that it actually dwarfs today's largest Lincoln, the Navigator L, by a full foot. Even Cadillac's longest Escalade comes up about five inches short.
Lincoln sold roughly 16,000 Town Coupes in 1979, compared to about 77,000 four-door Town Cars. They also moved more than 75,000 Continental Mark V coupes that year, which, in my opinion, were far more attractive. As absurd as full-size two-door cars are, the Mark V somehow made the concept make a lot more sense.
If that makes any sense.
Then again, I'm a two-door guy. If you're not, there's really no explaining it. It's one of those things you either get, or you don't.
Even for me, though, these later Town Coupes, which are technically pronounced "Town Coo-pay", are difficult to embrace. With their ultra-formal roofline and slab-sided styling shared with the Town Car, Lincoln did little more than remove two doors. The result was essentially a two-door sedan—a car that seemed to exist simply because it could. Well, Cadillac and Chrysler had a two-door flagship so why not. Thing is, the Cadillac Coupe deVille and Chrysler New Yorker Brougham two-doors had a rakishness these do not.
I'm more than willing to accept the inherent impracticality of a two-door, but the styling has to justify the compromise.
When Lincoln introduced this generation in 1970, the two-door Continental had a semi-rakish look that suggested it was something more than a four-door with fewer doors. It had a distinctive edge—subtle, but enough to make it feel a little dangerous and foreboding. It was the car for the well-heeled buyer who wanted something understated and imposing rather than the flamboyant, hump-backed Continental Mark.
As the 1970s wore on, however, Lincoln was forced to update the Continental. The federally mandated front impact bumper arrived in 1973, along with an awkward front-end facelift. The equally mandated rear bumper followed in 1974. Then came the 1975 redesign, which formalized the styling even further. Massive blade-like front fenders somehow made these already gigantic cars appear even larger. More significantly, the hardtop body style disappeared after 1974, leaving every coupe with a thick, formal roofline.
For 1977, Lincoln borrowed the Mark V's Rolls-Royce-esque waterfall grille. It probably looked like a good idea at the time, but it's a styling cue that hasn't aged particularly well. Today, it gives these cars an almost comic-book, cartoonish appearance.
I've always found it curious that Lincoln waited until 1980 to introduce the downsized Panther-platform Continental and Mark VI; the Ford Motor Company had downsized the Ford LTD and Mercury Marquis for model year 1979.
Then again, considering how well these land yachts continued to sell—helped in no small part by GM downsizing its full-size cars for 1977—it's easy to understand why Lincoln delayed.
There was also legitimate concern that the dramatically smaller 1980 models, despite being objectively better automobiles in almost every measurable way, wouldn't resonate with traditional Lincoln buyers.
Considering sales fell by roughly two-thirds year over year, those concerns appear to have been justified.
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