Road Test
To your list of things that will never happen, you can add one more: The hot-blooded pilotes of this staff will never rank this new Lincoln above a BMW, any BMW, in a comparison test. But the Supreme Court is not the only enclave of divided opinions; the contrarians among us think Ford has something going on here.
Consider the driver’s office. BMW and Benz, not to mention Honda and Acura designers—and Jaguar, too, now that we think of it—could learn much from a few hours in this Lincoln. The wide-screen dash display is so bright and legible you could read it with patches on both eyes. And the driver interface—the buttons or knobs or joysticks or what the Ultimate Driving Machine calls iDrive (i for infuriation?)—seems to explain itself at a glance here. The MKS combines a touch screen with just the right number of hard buttons and, even better, knobs. They’re all positioned high where you can see them, on the center stack in a remarkably simple array, angled just right for easy use. Strong, white, sans-serif characters on dark backgrounds encourage info to leap into your mind, whether from the screen or the dials of the cluster. Nothing blanks out when you put on your polarized sunglasses, either. Eat your hearts out, Benz and BMW drivers.
Better still, Lincoln designers had the less-is-more good sense to stand back and let function take the starring role. No aurora borealis shimmering in the dials or color-of-the-day lighting in the cup holders. Just leaping info. In the category of ergonomics, the MKS earns maximum points.
And those of us with long memories love the lavish chrome cabin detailing, the jewelry, a reminder of The American Way half a century back when our glittering Detroiters were the envy of the world. It was never done then with the high level of quality evident here.
The MKS makes Lincoln a three-car family as it slots under the AARP-favorite Town Car and over the dressed-up Ford Fusion d.b.a. the MKZ. With a base price of $38,465, ranging to $48,835 for a full-dress all-wheel-driver, the MKS has the comfort and style to keep up with the better-dressed of the Joneses, though it’s iffy on the prestige. Lincoln has been a low-luster brand for years—dallying with Blackwood and Mark LT trucks while the cars went yawn for yawn with Buick—so nobody expects this new middle child to punch toe-to-toe with a BMW 5-series or a Lexus GS. Wisely, Lincoln picked a lighter price class, safely under the roughly $45,000 starting point of the other two.
As a puncher, MKS heritage couldn’t be more dubious, built as it is on Taurus (née Ford Five Hundred) bones, a commodious family hauler, sure, but a bread pudding of a thing to drive. Borrowing cop phrasing, could such lineage possibly produce a sedan of interest to enthusiasts?
Well, no, not to the pilotes. The 3.7-liter Duratec V-6 is willing, and the six-speed automatic is adept, but you can expect just so much from 275 horsepower shouldering against a 4315-pound burden. With nary a chirp from the test car’s four driven wheels, it sauntered to 60 mph in 7.5 seconds and ambled on through the quarter in 15.7 seconds at 90 mph.
The brakes have a linear pedal feel that’s reassuring on the road, less so at the track where the 188-foot stopping distance from 70 mph is about typical for a full-size people hauler.
Our test car wears the double-upsized 20-inch bling-finish alloys with 245/45R-20 Michelin Primacy all-season rubber (18-inchers are standard equipment wrapped in 235/55s), but these are for eye grabbing more than road grabbing, as you can see by the so-so 0.82 g of grip on the skidpad. The stability control limits the fun at that point. Such low-profile tires react quickly to the steering, in some maneuvers a bit quicker than the chassis or the driver expects. So, occasionally, your steering input bites off more of a heading change than intended, requiring a hasty unsteer to correct.
