Lincoln Future
All of the many marques under the Ford Motor Company umbrella have suffered in the company's cash crisis over the last few years, but perhaps none has been worse served than Lincoln.
Except for the Navigator sport-brute which arrived last year, the second-most famous American luxury brand (behind Cadillac) has had nothing new to offer save an endless array of product promises.
There was for example that long period when the Detroit-based firm had a British designer trying to create cars that would honor Lincoln's classic past designs while driving like American Beemers, or something like that, but nothing really came of that.
Well, that's not quite true, a Ford PR executive told me over dinner at the Geneva Motor Show (without apparent irony) that certain ''aspects'' of the Gerry McGovern design era would be visible in future Lincolns. Oh, yeah, that should turn the division around.
Actually, what Ford hopes will turn the division around are new products using a platform from one of the company's other divisions -- Mazda. That would be the Mazda6, which itself is meeting with success in many other countries but not doing well in Canada primarily because it's too small to serve as a family sedan in this country.
Apparently that won't be a problem when it forms the basis for various Lincoln, Mercury, Ford, Mazda and maybe Volvo and Jaguar models in the future. Apparently, it was designed to stretch wider and longer so it will figuratively as well as literally carry Ford's hopes through the end of the decade at least.
This is the economical way for a struggling car company to create new products today, and it does not impress much of the media. The Wall Street Journal calls Ford's plan the ''auto industry's version of a dime,'' while the industry's primary trade publication, Automotive News, prefers simply ''on the cheap.''