Road Test
It's blacker than Darth's knickers, bolder than the Dark Lord's designs on the galaxy, and bigger than his personal shuttlecraft. Still, the Blackwood makes as much sense as any of the other peculiar manifestations of America's mysterious love affair with trucks. Hey, a Lincoln pickup? Well, why not? It certainly comes closer to personifying the notion of "American luxury" than anything else in Lincoln's lineup. After all, what could be more American than a full-size luxo pickup? And besides, we'll soon be seeing something very similar from Cadillac, called the Escalade EXT.
What we have here, mechanically speaking, is an amalgam of the Lincoln Navigator and the Ford F-150 SuperCrew pickup, with a power-operated tonneau that snugs down over a short, 56.3-inch cargo bed. Whoops, check that. On this rig, it's a cargo "trunk." The marketing troops make that distinction because they'd like this ride to be perceived as a luxury-utility vehicle rather than a pickup truck. The kids at Chevy are trying to promote a similar perception for the Avalanche, although they want you to think of that one as a UUV—ultimate utility-vehicle. Please. If there's a cargo bed extending beyond the cabin, we see a pickup truck.
Still, the word trunk has a fair degree of validity here, in part because it seals up nice and tight, and also because its capacity—27 cubic feet—is more comparable to that of sedans than to real beasts of burden. Lincoln's PR materials extol the capacity as "27 percent larger than the cavernous trunk of a Lincoln Town Car." Which is to say not much by pickup-truck standards.
On the other hand, one look inside the trunk—carpeted deck, LED light strips down each side, stainless-steel side trim—makes it clear that you wouldn't wanna throw your chainsaws in there. A case of Dom Pérignon, a crate of beluga caviar, and a cooler filled with foie gras would be more appropriate. And that's the idea. The Blackwood is conceived for folks who thrive on Blue Point oysters and think Spam is a computer term.
So why would a bon vivant want a pickup truck? Here's the answer. Lincoln anticipates that most if not all of the 10,000 or so expected to sign up for a Blackwood each year, at a base price of $52,500 per copy, will need a vehicle to augment recreation that entails serious towing, and has panache to boot. People who drag fancy boats with them, for example. And people who frequent the dressage circuit. Horsies are heavy, you know.
We gave the Blackwood a modest towing test—about 5000 pounds of trailer and race car, well below the truck's 8700-pound max—which it handled with ease. And if it wasn't the right rig for a racing weekend—the cargo trunk won't really swallow much in the way of spares—it certainly got lots of attention. We spent as much time demonstrating the tonneau operation and flipping open the Dutch-door tailgate as we did on checking tire pressures and torqueing wheel lugs.
Speaking of operating the tonneau—it takes about 10 seconds—Lincoln has gone out of its way to make that easy to do. There are two switches above the rearview mirror, another in the driver's door, and still another in the key fob, plus an escape release inside the cargo bay with a luminous handle.
The Blackwood's trunk has storage bins built into the sides of the cargo box and the tailgate doors. There's plenty of stowage for small objects inside the cabin, too, including the same rear center console used in the Navigator, an installation we've always thought would look more authentic if it were porcelain rather than plastic.
Like the exterior, the Blackwood's interior is noir on noir, a coal bin in the dark of a moonless night—way cool if you're into Edgar Allan Poe color schemes, and like the exterior, the only choice. On the other hand, the Blackwood is about as lux as it gets in the world of pickups, with unusual goodies such as front seats that waft hot or cold air through the perforated Connolly leather upholstery. There's also a $1995 GPS navigational system (the Blackwood's lone option), power everything, auto climate controls, and, of course, a terrific audio system with a six-disc CD changer in the center console.
