Filed under: Crossover, Lincoln, Reviews, Luxury
Competing Against Edge More Than Other Luxury CUVs
2011 Lincoln MKX - Click above for high-res image gallery
With Mercury dead, hundreds of former Lincoln-Mercury dealerships will be forced to rely on Ford's 93-year-old luxury brand to bring home the bacon alone. These dealers are nervous about their future, and rightfully so.
Every Lincoln on sale today is a gussied up version of a Ford. True, most mainstream automakers with luxury divisions, like Toyota/Lexus, Honda/Acura and Volkswagen/Audi, use a similar strategy of platform and technology sharing to save costs, but U.S. domestic automakers have never been particularly good at it. A Volkswagen is usually praised for being Audi-like, but a Lincoln is usually decried for being too similar to a Ford. Sharing can so easily become rebadging, and Lincoln dealers are wondering how they'll live off a lineup of simply "more expensive" Fords.
The answer may lie in the 2011 Lincoln MKX, which is the lux version of the Ford Edge. Since the latter received a significant mid-cycle freshening for the 2011 model year, so has the former. With their first significant update since 2006, the duo is poised to upset the status quo in the premium mid-size CUV segment. We've already told you how impressed we are with the 2011 Edge, so you won't be surprised to learn we feel much the same about the new MKX. The difference is that the Lincoln has a lot further to go to be competitive within the luxury CUV set. Does it succeed? Will we now praise the Edge for being Lincoln-like?
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Photos copyright (C)2010 John Neff / AOL
Continue reading Review: 2011 Lincoln MKX
Review: 2011 Lincoln MKX originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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