Lincoln Continental Mark III - Creation, Market Position, and Sales Outcomes

Creation, Market Position, and Sales Outcomes

The Mark III was created when Lee Iacocca, president of Ford Motor Company at the time, directed Design Vice President, Gene Bordinat, to "put a Rolls Royce grille on a Thunderbird" in September 1965. The Mark III was based on the four-door Thunderbird model, which was first introduced for 1967. Iacocca wanted to put the Thunderbird's development investment to better use than just the Thunderbird model alone, which "was dying in the marketplace." Instead, Ford would use that investment as a platform for several models.

Intended to compete head-to-head with Cadillac's heavily redesigned front wheel drive Eldorado, the Mark III made its debut a clear notch above less expensive, less well-appointed personal luxury cars such as the Ford Thunderbird, Buick Riviera and Oldsmobile Toronado. As the Eldorado was built upon the Toronado frame, so the Mark III was the Thunderbird's. While the side-rail frame was identical to the Thunderbird's, the Mark III bore almost 300 lb (140 kg) more bodywork. Power was ample from Lincoln's all-new 460 cu in (7.5 l) 365 bhp (272 kW) V8, a member of the Ford 385 engine family.

Introduced in April 1968 as an early 1969 model, the model was a remarkable commercial success because it combined the high unit revenue of a luxury model with the low development costs and fixed cost–amortizing utility of platform-sharing, in a car that was appealing enough to buyers that many units were sold. Iacocca said, "We brought out the Mark III in April 1968, and in its very first year it outsold the Cadillac Eldorado, which had been our long-range goal. For the next five years we had a field day, in part because the car had been developed on the cheap. We did the whole thing for $30 million, a bargain-basement price, because we were able to use existing parts and designs." Iacocca explained that this transformed the Lincoln-Mercury Division from losing money on every luxury car (via low unit sales on high fixed costs) to a profit center that in its best year of the series earned Ford almost $1 billion profit from Lincoln alone, making the new Mark series as big a success as any he ever had in his career—a remarkable statement from an executive who led the programs for the original Ford Mustang and the Chrysler minivan family. Iacocca explained of the Mark series, "The Mark is Ford's biggest moneymaker, just as Cadillac is for General Motors. It's the Alfred Sloan theory: you have to have something for everybody you always need a poor man's car but then you need upscale cars, too, because you never know when the blue-collar guy is going to be laid off. It seems that in the United States the one thing you can count on is that even during a depression, the rich get richer. So you always have to have some goodies for them."

The Continental Mark III was a spiritual successor of the limited-production, ultra-luxurious Continental Mark II produced by a short-lived Continental division of Ford Motor Company between in 1956 and 1957. The new Mark of 1968–69, dubbed the Mark III, was actually not the first model to use the name; an earlier Continental Mark III had first worn the name in 1958. Large and somewhat extravagant even for its time, it did not sell as well as Cadillac, but nonetheless earned high reviews from motoring periodicals of the day. The 1958 Mark III was the first car to be built at the new Wixom, Michigan assembly plant, the same plant where future Mark-series cars would continue to be built.

In style, the Mark III was squarer and more upright than the sleek Thunderbird, featured a Rolls-Royce like grill, hidden headlights, and a classic albeit ersatz Mark II spare tire bulge on its trunk.