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The word is getting around that Ford Motor plans to kill the Lincoln Town Car. Ford builds it at the Wixom, Mich., plant outside Detroit, home of the now-dead Lincoln LS, the now-dead Ford Thunderbird and the long-dead Lincoln Continental. The company is closing the plant next spring.
Ford could build the Town Car in Canada, because this model shares a platform with the venerable Ford Crown Victoria and Mercury Grand Marquis. Union people in Canada say that Ford tells them that won't happen. It's hard to see the Town Car built anywhere else. Ford won't admit the Town Car will die and says that all the talk is just speculation. Yet it is reasonable to figure that if they were going to keep building the Town Car, they would say so. So bye-bye old friend.
You might say this was just a big, old-fashioned dinosaur bought only by the nursing-home set (the average retail buyer was near 70) and limo crowd. Real men wanted a Mercedes, Lexus or BMW--a modern luxury car for modern folk.
All that is true, but it overlooks one key point: the importance of the Town Car to Ford.
One former Ford president, Donald Petersen, told me how they thought the big Lincoln was dead when General Motors moved Cadillac to front-wheel drive in the 1980s. Lincoln had planned to go front drive, but their front-drive car was not ready. To the surprise of many, Cadillac began to die when it went front drive with its big DeVille sedan and has never fully recovered.
For two decades, Lincoln had the only domestic rear-drive luxury car, and Town Car sales grew as Cadillac fell. Lincoln, which had been profitable one year in its history, was suddenly rolling in money. Annual Town Car sales climbed over the 100,000 mark during the mid-1980s and early 1990s.
Lee Iacocca, who was once president of Ford, told me that at 120,000 units, Ford would be making $10,000 apiece on Town Cars. That is more than a billion dollars in profits. And a third Ford president, Ed Hagenlocker, told me in 1996 that the Town Car platform, which also included the Ford Crown Victoria and Mercury Grand Marquis--together accounting for 350,000 cars per year--was Ford's most profitable car platform.
Through the first six months of this year, Town Car sales fell 11% to 21,842 units. Yet even in its decline, this car still accounts for more than half of Lincoln’s passenger car sales. The only other passenger car in Lincoln’s current lineup, the Zephyr, is a smaller front-wheel-drive sedan that is a dressed-up Ford Fusion.
In the 1990s, Town Car sales began to slip. One reason was the 1998 model year redesign, which shortened the car and reduced the trunk space. When you have a high-profit car with solid markets--older rich men and the livery service--you do not let it get old and die. You bring out a new model and a new design with modern engineering. Instead, Ford just made minimal investment and milked the business.
The Town Car is a solid vehicle. The livery drivers who drive my editor home on late nights tell him that the Town Car is no sports sedan but is quite reliable. One driver, for example, had 252,000 miles on his car--all trouble-free of major engine or transmission work. Livery drivers may change their oil and fluids more regularly than the average consumer, but they work their cars hard 5 to 7 days per week in bumper-to-bumper city driving, high-speed highway driving and in all kinds of weather.
The sad thing is that while Ford was cleaning up on the Town Car, there was no real competition. Cadillac was front drive, and until a few years ago, DaimlerChrysler did not have a big rear-wheel-drive sedan in its lineup.
Now the Town Car is facing competition. The Chrysler 300, a handsome, rear-drive sedan introduced for the 2005 model year, is just nibbling at the Town Car’s market. Starting next month, Chrysler will send some sedan bodies to a Midwest contractor who will stretch and outfit them. But an official stretch version of the 300, which I understand Chrysler is considering, could pose a bigger threat. Chrysler is also flirting with the idea of building an even larger, more luxurious, Imperial off the 300 platform. In short, Ford is handing its rival a gift.
What is wrong with Ford’s current management crew? Certainly they are aware how profitable the Town Car/Ford Crown Victoria/Mercury Grand Marquis had been. William Clay Ford, Jr., the chief executive, and Mark Fields, second in command, must know how luxury drivers like rear drive.
So why would they abandon the Town Car market and bring out--as they are going to do--a front-drive design fitted as an all-wheel-drive car? That model, the Lincoln MKS, related to the Ford 500 and a Volvo model, is due in maybe 18 months. It is not the first time that Ford attempted to slip an all-wheel-drive car in the market as a substitute for a genuine rear driver. Look no further than the all-wheel-drive Jaguar X, a flop.
All this makes one wonder whether Ford’s current managers understand the car business. When a company loses one-fourth of its market share in five and a half years, you have to assume that managers don't know what they're doing. I believe that the Ford marketing people hate the Town Car customers. The youngsters working in marketing think about girls wearing stretch pants, not about selling cars to us geezers, even if we have the money.
A few weeks ago, I got a note from an ex-Ford man, a veteran from the original Team Taurus that produced what once was America’s best-selling car. He writes, "The knowable people were chased out through Ford 2000 (a reorganization plan of six years ago)."
When they write the next history of Ford Motor, the book should have a chapter titled, "The Wreck of the Town Car."
I’ve heard rumor that this is being floated as the replacement to the Panther platform cars (Town Car/Crown Vic/Grand Marquis) for around 2008 – 