If I say “American luxury SUV”, your thoughts will almost certainly turn to something enormous like a Lincoln Navigator or a Cadillac Escalade. The idea of a smaller domestic “luxury ute” really doesn’t cross your mind, other than maybe some existing products that are very much low-ground-clearance crossovers and not true off-roaders. That’s why a rumor we’ve heard recently about Ford developing a Lincoln-badged Bronco-based SUV has the internet all aflutter with activity and car websites covered with rather poorly photoshopped or AI-generated examples of what this thing might be.
I went ahead and did my own badly Photoshopped idea of where I’d like to see Ford take this luxo off-roader, but I’m still a bit confused about exactly which Blue Oval product to base it on. We want comfortable, capable, and affordable, but in the cold, hard reality of the day, I think we might have to pick just two of those three.
Luxury Is A State Of Brand
“Luxury” is such an annoying word. More often than not, the meaning of that word today really relates to the brand of a product more than its actual attributes. For example, our man Steven Gossin recently just purchased an old Chrysler Aspen SUV, a vehicle that is likely more comfortable and spacious than a similar year Mercedes ML or BMW X5 (and likely more reliable). Despite this, the kind of person who would specifically ask for a “luxury” SUV would never be caught dead in a Chrysler, not in a million years. That’s kind of the case with today’s small “luxury” SUVs – their credibility is determined not by what they do, but by the logo on the grille. Even stranger is that they often get their status from off-road capabilities, which have really nothing to do with “luxury” in any sense of the word.
The biggest players in the small luxury SUV field are likely the cool-looking Land Rover Defender and the Lexus GX550, which doesn’t look quite as cool but stands a better chance of not being in a junkyard twelve years from now (again, ask Mr. Gossin how many British-branded SUVs he saw on his last visit to a pick-and-pull).
Neither the Defender nor the GX550 is a poser. Both are highly capable off-roading machines that still offer relative comfort; both are engineered for severe service in all sorts of off-road conditions. A Mercedes G-Wagen at a higher price point has similar skills. By these accounts, you might say that any Lincoln competitor to these class leaders would need to be similarly over-engineered. The real question I have about this is, why?
The Lexus Jeeps And The Benz Jeeps And The Lincoln Jeeps
There’s a scene in the infamous 1972 movie Deliverance where Burt Reynolds’ character was scripted to go over a waterfall, and the plan to capture this on film was to send a dummy representation of the actor into this perilous situation. Famously, Burt refused this and insisted on doing the stunt himself, an act which shattered his tailbone, knocked him unconscious, ripped off his clothes, and nearly drowned him. Recuperating from his injuries, an aching Burt asked the director how his painful stunt appeared on film. “It looked,” the director said sheepishly, “like a dummy going over a waterfall.”
That’s kind of how I feel about a Bronco-based “luxury” SUV. Ford could do it, but why? Virtually nobody buying a Defender or GX is taking it off-road; the ones you might see in an off-road park are most often a decade old and on their third owners. Worse than that is the cost of a Bronco-based Lincoln SUV would probably be painfully close to the price of those high-end imports, and I get the sense that it might be too agricultural to really meet them head-to-head anyway.
That raises the important question: would it make more sense to base a small Lincoln SUV on an expanded and lifted Bronco Sport / Maverick chassis? Yeah, I can hear all you Moab runners groaning, but Ford probably couldn’t care less what hard-core, cash-poor off-roaders want.
More importantly, the Maverick, even in low-ground-clearance form and without a locking differential or transfer case, is pretty damn capable. Watch the clip below. With a locking diff to kill the wheelspin, that little sumbeech be killing it.
Is there such a rock-covered trail like that which people in Westport or here in the North Shore of Chicagoland use to get to Whole Foods? No, there isn’t; these luxury SUVs will never encounter this kind of use, and even if they did with a bit of tweaks, I could see that Maverick just eating that trail in the video above for breakfast.
Still, it’s how this new luxury little SUV looks and how it functions in upper-middle-class suburbia that’s important. Let’s get to drawing and Photoshopping.
Out-Of-Town Car
If the Defender and GX are indeed the benchmarks of successful small luxury SUVs, we would do well to put them into a blender and get our Lincoln competitor, the Sentinel. I wouldn’t go all Ineos Grenadier with a “tribute”, but we could take some of the best and most recognizable aspects of them to fit the country club parking lot. Oddly enough, the Maverick is within an inch or so of the length of both the Defender and GX, so if we did go that direction, it might be a good place to start.
Plus, we’d have a wheelbase long enough for some kind of third row, which I think would be mandatory to be competitive here. First, I’d add a rather clean and blunt front end with the latest Lincoln styling cues; a lot of body colored surface, not unlike the Lexus GX, but with a bit less fussy detailing. The flanks are sort of slab-sided with a bullnose radius at the top, and the charcoal rocker panels and squared-off wheel arches are naturally a nod to the small Land Rover.
Now we have something that at least looks like it could conquer the trails, which is really the biggest consideration in this market. With those big wheels and tires, extra ground clearance (maybe air suspension), and locking differentials, I think it would be a lot more capable than you’d imagine for a unibody machine.
One thing that our Brian Silvestro mentioned in his recent piece on a Lincoln Bronco is that it would need something trick to set it apart from the lower-level Fords to justify the price. That’s why I’d give the Sentinel an elevated rear roof with extra “Vista Cruiser” style skylights on the sides and just ahead of the second row. A real luxury vehicle gives a “sense of occasion” when riding in it, and despite car makers trending towards removing any and all windows in a car, I intend to go the other direction. Sunlight, people!
You can see that there’s a power sliding sunroof over the rear passenger area and a smaller glass one over the front seats that slides back and over the forward-facing skylight. Such a raised roof would also allow the third row to sit somewhat higher in a “theater seating” manner for visibility and to give those passengers more leg space.
The most obvious design ripoff would be from two different sources. You can see that I’ve added a grey opaque panel just behind the rear doors, similar to the Defender, but what’s with the cut lines I’ve added? Well, here I steal an idea from the latest Hyundai Santa Fe: the hidden handle.
The Lincoln would actually have two handles that are revealed by pushing in the interlinked upper and lower panels. A lower one would be there for kids or very short people, while the one above would be for taller individuals. It’s a cool Hyundai idea, and it keeps the sides aerodynamic and at least part of the handles free of dirt.
In back, I’d like to reintroduce something that Ford invented in the mid-sixties: the “magic door” 3-way tailgate. This innovation (designed by, of all things, the person who designed the “big” Austin Healey sports car) involved a power-lowering tailgate window and could be opened like a normal door or pivoted down like a tailgate once you lowered the glass. This was everywhere in the seventies and then slowly disappeared. Well, we should bring it back.
Take a look at what I also added: the classic Continental “tire hump”! Yes! If this thing bothers you, an actual full-sized spare on a pivoting bracket could fit over the offending lump.
Maybe we need to offer a longer wheelbase version as well to compete with the Defender 130 and to give the second and third row a little more room.
What about a pickup truck version?
Personally, I wonder if the more crossover-like Lincoln “Maverick” I showed some time back makes more sense:
Would offering a more crossover-like wagon be better than a Defender-style pickup? I really don’t know.
Maybe Lincoln could offer both? This is hardly a market segment that’s shrinking.
Ain’t That Tough Enough?
Look, many Autopians with almost-twenty-year-old Lexus SUVs (me!) or fifth-owner Christmas-tree-dashboard Range Rovers would love to see a Bronco full-frame Lincoln SUV, maybe even with a V8. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that such a product might be prohibitively expensive; certainly more than a Maverick-based one. Worse than that, despite generally being more comfortable than a Wrangler, Ford might need to work hard to make the Bronco into an acceptable “luxury” product, and why? Ninety-nine percent of buyers wouldn’t give a sh*t that a Bronco-chassis Lincoln could do some “sick rock crawling”. Actually, make that ninety-nine-point nine percent of buyers. Let’s go back fifty years and take some lessons.
In the late seventies, Matra gave us a vehicle with a front-drive Simca compact drivetrain called the Rancho that offered the look without the capabilities. It sold faster than little car maker Matra could build them. Actually, that’s probably an unfair comparison since if we added a locking differential to go along with the lifted height, a Maverick-based Lincoln SUV would have the ability to silence most critics.
During the same time period as the Rancho, in America, General Motors gave us the first domestic compact “international-sized luxury” car, the Nova-based Cadillac Seville.
The Seville blew up the sales charts despite being the most expensive Cadillac other than the factory-stretched limo. No, you couldn’t hit the Autobahn in it, but few buyers were ever going to do that anyway.
Regardless of which underpinnings are chosen– Maverick, Bronco, or even Ranger – the undeniable fact is that nobody makes a legitimate smaller American luxury SUV today, and they’re leaving money on the table. A lot of money.
Top graphic base image: Ford
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