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Lincoln stays on track with Navigator SUV - sport utility vehicle

The one domestic luxury make which has never offered a downscale car is not doing it this year, even though its chief rival is going that route and it is adding a first-of-its-kind body style.

It is Lincoln, of course, the only car ever named after a U.S. President and the jewel in Ford Motor Co.'s crown since the 1920s.

Instead of matching strides with Cadillac and going downmarket with a counterpart to the Catera being imported from Opel in Germany, Lincoln-Mercury is following the precedent of luxury competitors Infiniti, Lexus and Mercedes-Benz by introducing the high-on-the-hog Navigator SUV, a gussier rendition of the Ford Expedition.

Debuting this spring, Navigator is "going to energize the Lincoln franchise because about 11,000 former Lincoln owners have turned to sports utility vehicles with luxury treatments, like Mercury Mountaineer, Jeep Grand Cherokee and Lexus LX 450," says Carl E. Bergman, L-M's general marketing manager.

Mountaineer, derived from the Ford Explorer platform, is not now viewed as a Navigator competitor because it is smaller than Expedition and Ford executives oppose any Cadillac-like move on Lincoln's part that risks degrading the Lincoln brand image.

Though many Lincoln-Mercury dealers believe a compact Lincoln would work, others recall Cadillac's flops with Cimarron and Allante and old-timers warn that the Packard Clipper sank that luxury make in the 1950s even though Clipper itself was a worthy competitor to Olds, Buick and DeSoto at the time.

Explains Bergman: "We'd rather try to keep our owners in the fold with a super-luxury SUV in the Navigator than risk alienating our Town Car and Continental loyalists because a 'Lincolnized' Sable is added to the line. We'll watch how Catera does with interest, but we're better off with Navigator than a Lincoln edition of the Mercury Villager minivan or a compact car."

Navigator, also the first Lincoln which will be assembled at a plant other than the dedicated Lincoln facility at Wixom, Mich., will enter the market on the heels of a controversial reduction in Lincoln's dealer discount from 17 to 14 percent on the 1997-model Continental and Mark VIII.

The discount cut facilitated welcome price reduction of up to $4,300 but was opposed "on principle" by a number of key L-M dealers because, as one anonymous dealer in Massachusetts put it, "it sets a precedent when the price is raised again and the discount might not be. Besides, Town Car was kept at 17 percent and with so many Lincolns being leased, it's better for our profit potentials when the discounts are kept higher than cut and raised, then raised and cut like a seesaw."

In another unique move to distinguish the Lincoln brand for 1997, in the face of a soft luxury-car market, a single starting MSRP was adopted for the three car models last October - $37,950.

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