CARS OF THE WORLD

Lincoln Model L100 Concept 2023.

Lincoln Model L100 Concept 2023: TV in the floor, giant doors and total autonomy.

Ford’s premium Lincoln brand has prepared a Model L100 luxury electric liftback for the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, showing how the design and layout of cars change as they transition to new technologies.

The Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is one of the highlights of auto week in Monterey, California, which this year has been particularly prolific with luxury new products.

The Lincoln Model L100 Concept commemorates the centennial of the brand’s incorporation into Ford and Lincoln’s first production car, the 1922 Model L phaeton, elegant and quite expensive for its time.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. market Lincoln now has not a single traditional passenger car, the lineup consists of four different crossovers — Corsair, Nautilus, Aviator and Navigator.

But in China, which Lincoln makes a big bet on (last year, Lincoln sales in China for the first time in history exceeded sales in the U.S.).

Sedans are still in demand, so the Model L100 concept is not devoid of prospects, and a Lincoln passenger car flagship could be made out of it.

Lincoln designers obviously wanted to outdo Cadillac with its InnerSpace concept (introduced earlier this year).

The Model L100 is larger and more elegant than the InnerSpace, and the process of getting into the cabin is even more theatrical.

Lincoln welcomes passengers with LED lights (even the wheels have a built-in «color music») and automatically opens the giant doors, which cover two-thirds of the body length and include the rear wheel arches.

Along with the doors, the glass roof rises upward for easy boarding/disembarking.

The hood is made transparent and united with the windshield — an absurd solution in terms of maintainability, but the calculation is made for the fact that in the future the cars will be completely driverless and will not be involved in accidents.

The driver in the Lincoln Model L100 Concept is not provided in principle, that is, there is no steering wheel and pedals even when folded, so all seats are passenger.

The interior is designed as a cozy living room with two sofas and a touch table between them, on this table is a crystal controller in the form of a car — the main and only physical control, it is convenient to play virtual chess with it, for example (the board is drawn on the surface of the table).

The rear sofa has a fixed backrest, and the front one has a sliding one — you can sit forward or backward or remove the backrest to the front panel.

The floor of the Lincoln Model L100 Concept is one big screen, which can complement the picture of the sky and create a feeling of flight or just show beautiful atmospheric patterns.

About the technical stuffing Lincoln Model L100 Concept almost nothing — it is reported only that the electric car is equipped with some kind of innovative deep-integrated battery with high energy density, that is the range on a single charge will exceed all expectations.

But we will probably have to wait a long time, as progress in terms of batteries and autonomous driving systems in recent years leaves much to be desired.

It should be reminded that Ford in the middle of the last decade rashly promised a mass-produced unmanned car without steering wheel and pedals by 2021, but then it realized that it had overreached, and it has not indicated new «event horizons» since then.