LINCOLN

Continental

The Lincoln Continental began not as a production model but as a personal car for Edsel Ford, who returned from a 1938 European tour inspired by the long-bonnet elegance of continental coachbuilt cars and challenged Ford design chief Bob Gregorie to create something similar. The resulting one-off, a low, clean-lined convertible based on the Lincoln-Zephyr, drew so much admiration during Edsel's Florida vacation that Lincoln put it into production for 1940. Distinguished by its exposed rear-mounted spare wheel, a feature that gave the world the term "Continental kit," the Lincoln Continental was powered by a 4.8-litre, later 5.0-litre, L-head V12 and offered as both a graceful Cabriolet and a Coupe. Every Lincoln Continental was essentially hand-built, and the model was praised by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who famously called it the most beautiful car in the world. Production was interrupted by the Second World War, with just 200 cars made in the 1942 model year before Pearl Harbor halted civilian output, and resumed from 1946 to 1948. Across the entire first generation, only 5,324 examples of the Lincoln Continental were built, split between 3,047 Coupes and 2,277 Cabriolets. The death of Edsel Ford in 1943 robbed Lincoln of the vision needed to renew the design, and the first Lincoln Continental ended in 1948, but its influence was immense, earning it a place in the Museum of Modern Art and cementing the Lincoln Continental as a true American design landmark.