The folks at Ford like to talk about the funky styling and the high-tech interior, but the real significance of the Concept C is its proportions. This is a car that's as short overall as the Ford Focus, but as wide as a Fusion, delivering most of the interior room Americans expect in a luxury car. In fact, says Ford's Advanced Design studio chief, Freeman Thomas (whose past credits include concepts that inspired the VW New Beetle, Audi TT, and Chrysler 300C), the Concept C is more spacious inside than a '61 Lincoln Continental, a car that was once the preferred transport of presidents and princes.
Disregard auto-show eyewash such as the exaggerated exterior graphics, the lack of a B-pillar, the Vogue Living interior appointments; Ford's global design boss, J Mays, says the car could be built on the forthcoming C346 architecture that will, among other things, underpin the next-generation Focus. The key point about C346 is that it can be both stretched and widened, allowing Ford to build "wide-body" small cars specifically for the American market if it decides to. "Because we don't have the burden of having to sell a car like the Concept C in every market around the world," says Ford sales and marketing chief Jim Farley, "we don't have to be careful about the width."
Significantly, Ford is being given a lot of encouragement to build a production version of the Concept C from an unlikely group: Lincoln dealers. "We have a product-steering committee with the dealers and they were like, 'Hey, Jim, what do we have to give up to get that?'" says Farley. "That's a conversation you never have with dealers."
Farley says the Concept C reveals a lot about the future of a brand Ford Motor Company has struggled to figure out. "It says we're moving out of dead segments and into vibrant segments of the market," Farley explains. "It says we know what the heck Lincoln is-and, more important, what it's not. And it says Lincoln is no longer tied to the size of an automobile."
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