Ford’s Lincoln luxury brand has not been particularly known for radical automotive designs. But the Model L100 Concept—named after the 1922 Model L and in celebration of the brand’s 100th anniversary—shows that the brand is thinking about a dramatically different kind of luxury car in the future.
The Lincoln Model L100 Concept, revealed in coordination with Monterey Car Week on Thursday, can segue between driver-centric and social seating configurations, although a “jewel-inspired chess piece controller” replaces the traditional steering wheel, as autonomous driving takes priority.
What driving? The people inside can do something else.
Lincoln L100 Concept
Lincoln L100 Concept
Lincoln L100 Concept
It uses a combination of metallic paint and frosted acrylic instead of chrome, with a “satin digital ceramic tricoat” so as to transition from a warm, soft white to a cool blue. The wheel covers contain sensors and communicate about battery life. The interior goes free of animal-derived materials, and the “digital floor” can help enhance the occupants’ moods.
Lincoln L100 Concept
Perhaps most notably, the Model L100 Concept opens up like a flower—or comes out of its shell, your pick of loaded clichés—with side doors and a roof all hinged at the rear of the vehicle. They all open on welcome, as part of a so-called Lincoln Embrace, perhaps in a futureworld with all the space to do so and the car parks itself away where door dings are an impossibility.
Lincoln doesn’t provide any technical details—not even dimensions—but it says that the Model L100 Concept uses “next generation battery cell and pack technologies, which will deliver game changing energy density and enable efficient, structural integration by treating the entire vehicle as a system.” The car appears to be set low, which might simply be the result of its length and gigantic wheels. Cigar boats come to mind in profile.
Lincoln L100 Concept
Up until now, Lincoln has been treading toward EVs with caution. Its first couple of EVs, one of them a project with Rivian and the other an “elegant” EV based on the Mach-E, have both been canceled. The brand's first plug-in model, the Aviator Grand Touring plug-in hybrid, is more of a niche performance version, and it was followed by the more widely available Lincoln Corsair Grand Touring PHEV. The brand now reportedly plans a full line of electric SUVs, although the first of those remains at least two years out.
Lincoln L100 Concept
Before you write this all off as a mere exercise for designers, keep in mind that, far-fetched technology aside, this is how a brand tests (and refines) where its styling is headed in the future. The front-end styling does look a bit like that of the Lincoln Star electric SUV concept shown earlier this year; and the creative door/roof/frunk opening methods are something seen there, too. Is this the sort of Quiet Flight you’d climb into?
