1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III in Medium Blue Metallic / Bring a Trailer
Years ago, I called the 1969–1971 Lincoln Continental Mark III vulgar, which continues to get me periodic hate mail. While I still don’t much like the Mark III, I’ve come to admit that in certain important respects, it was a more successful effort than a rival I like a lot better — the 1967–1970 Cadillac Eldorado. Here’s why.
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III / Bring a Trailer
In some eras, some automakers are engineering-driven, while others are dominated by styling. Ford in the ’60s and ’70s was all about product planning.
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III / Bring a Trailer
What’s product planning? There are various definitions floating around, many of them painfully buzzword-heavy, but the basic concept is ensuring that a product — in this case, a car or truck, or a specific model — has enough of the right features to meet its marketing goals. “Features” can mean many different things, some quantitative, some qualitative, some purely subjective. For example, a sporty car à la product planner might combine exterior design features (e.g., a blacked-out grille, stripes, styled wheels), some interior design elements (e.g., bucket seats, floor shifter, extra instruments), and a few performance cues (e.g., a slightly stiffer suspension and a racier exhaust note). The resulting car might not offer great performance in any objective sense, but if it looked and felt sporty in the showroom or on a test drive, it would have a good chance of selling well regardless, which is the product planner’s ultimate goal.
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III / Bring a Trailer
Ford Motor Company got to be outstandingly good at this sort of thing in the ’60s. They had some lapses (the big-engine Fairlane GT/GTA was perfunctory, and the late ’60s U.S. Falcon seemed calculated to limit its desirability relative to its Mustang and Fairlane cousins), but also some big hits, like the Mustang, the LTD, the first Mercury Cougar, and the Capri. These weren’t necessarily outstanding cars, but they were exceptional products, and very successful commercially.
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III / Bring a Trailer
Which is a good segue to the Lincoln Continental Mark III. Introduced in April 1968, the Mark III was essentially a fancier Thunderbird variant, a bigger two-door hardtop sharing the longer wheelbase of the four-door Thunderbird Landau and the new 460 cu. in. V-8 of the latest Lincoln Continental. Conceptually, the Mark III was to be the ultimate personal luxury car — a genre Ford had more or less invented, and understood well — topping even its august Thunderbird sibling.
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III / Orlando Classic Cars
The Mark III was Lee Iacocca’s baby, and the car’s actual designers (including L. David Ash and Arthur Querfeld, who did the exterior, and Damon Woods, who led the interior design) have confirmed that Iacocca dictated the direction of the product and had a clear idea of what it should be. Moreover, he also had a crystal-clear idea of the intended customers: affluent buyers, primarily men, in roughly the same age range as Iacocca (born 1924) and Henry Ford II (born 1917).
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III / Orlando Classic Cars
Thus, Mark III exterior design evoked high-end prewar luxury cars — a dollop of Packard Speedster, a splash of Duesenberg Model J, a and seasoning of Rolls-Royce Phantom II, with their endless hoods and stand-up grilles. These points of reference weren’t cars the target audience would probably have owned, but rather cost-no-object fantasy objects they might have coveted as boys, seen being driven in newsreels or movie magazine photo shoots by luminaries like Clark Gable or Gary Cooper.
1935 Duesenberg Model JN convertible coupe, originally owned by Clark Gable / Collecting Cars
At the launch of the Mark III, Ford Design VP Gene Bordinat had summed up the new model’s mission statement with unusual candor, remarking, “We have put things on the Mark III that make it evident that this is an expensive car.” There was no question of making the Mark III an actual cost-no-object luxury car (Ford had tried that with the Continental Mark II in the ’50s and lost a ton of money in the process), so the new Mark was essentially still a Thunderbird under the skin, albeit with tweaks to the structure and suspension to improve isolation and NVH. The Mark III even shared the Thunderbird windshield, side glass, A-pillars, and roof, although raising the upper back panel made the roof look lower, and the longer hood, faux Rolls-Royce grille, and Continental hump further disguised the resemblance.
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III / Orlando Classic Cars
As I said at the outset, I much prefer the contemporary Cadillac Eldorado, although if you wanted to judge it in the same terms, you could argue that it was really just an Oldsmobile Toronado with new sheet metal, a new roof, and a Cadillac V-8 in place of the Olds Rocket engine. Like the Toronado, the Eldorado’s engineering was more interesting than that of the Thunderbird or Mark III, but I doubt more than one Eldorado buyer in ten really cared, or even noticed. The main selling point of the original FWD Eldorado was and remains its exterior styling, which was an exceptional design:
1968 Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado in San Mateo Red / Orlando Classic Cars
1968 Cadillac Eldorado / Orlando Classic Cars
Where the Mark III was retro, neoclassical, the Eldorado was crisp and modern — arguably the ultimate ’60s Cadillac, and much more to my taste, at least before it lost its concealed headlights for 1969.
1968 Cadillac Eldorado, still sporting its signature concealed headlamps / Orlando Classic Cars
When it came to interior design, however, the Eldorado seemed to lose its focus. Other than the flat floor and a few Fleetwood trim touches, the cabin of this 1968 Eldorado could just as easily have been in a Coupe de Ville.
1968 Cadillac Eldorado / Orlando Classic Cars
1968 Cadillac Eldorado with black leather upholstery / Orlando Classic Cars
It wasn’t bad (as I’ve said before, I think 1968 was the last really good year for Cadillac interior quality), but it didn’t offer anything new or unique to complement the knockout exterior or novel engineering.
1968 Cadillac Eldorado with black leather upholstery / Orlando Classic Cars
1968 Cadillac Eldorado with black leather upholstery / Orlando Classic Cars
It’s here that the Mark III gained a lot of ground over its Cadillac rival. I should be clear that I don’t especially like the interior of the Mark III aesthetically (although the attractive dark blue trim of the car pictured below certainly helps), but I think the Lincoln-Mercury interior designers understood the assignment in a way their counterparts at Cadillac didn’t.
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III with dark blue leather and vinyl upholstery / Bring a Trailer
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III with dark blue leather and vinyl upholstery / Bring a Trailer
The interior design of the Mark III had two major challenges: It need to mask the Mark’s similarity to the Thunderbird, and it needed to pay off the promise of the exterior styling, whether with the standard tricot cloth and vinyl upholstery …
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III with light blue cloth and vinyl upholstery / Bring a Trailer
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III with light blue cloth and vinyl upholstery / Bring a Trailer
… or with leather and vinyl trim, a $137.26 option.
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III with dark blue leather and vinyl upholstery / Bring a Trailer
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III with dark blue leather and vinyl upholstery / Bring a Trailer
I appreciate the Mark’s full instrumentation (which was actually shared with the Thunderbird, adding different faces to the same instruments), but there’s a lot I don’t care for: the squared-off instrument bezels, the two-spoke steering wheel, the acres of woodgrain applique. (The 1968 Eldorado veneer was still real wood, which the Mark III didn’t get until 1970.)
Ammeter, temperature gauge, rear vent control, and wiper/washer control in a 1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III / Bring a Trailer
I’d also much prefer a tachometer to the Cartier chronometer with its pompous Roman numerals (added in December 1968):
Cartier chronometer in a 1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III / Bring a Trailer
However, I can’t deny that the woodgrain trim and diamond-pattern button-tufted upholstery did succeed in making the Mark’s interior look rich and extravagant (if perhaps a tad overripe in spots), where the Eldorado inside was just another Cadillac.
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III with blue leather and vinyl upholstery / Bring a Trailer
1968 Cadillac Eldorado with black leather upholstery / Orlando Classic Cars
Lincoln had sweated the details, too, down to the designed-in wrinkles in the upholstery — a controversial choice within Ford. (I think the wrinkled effect worked better with leather upholstery, helping to mitigate the plasticky look contemporary leather options had begun to exhibit.)
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III with dark blue leather and vinyl upholstery / Bring a Trailer
Between Iacocca and product planning director Ralph Peters, I assume the mandate was that the Mark III needed to look special and feel special enough to justify its price, even in minor details:
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III with dark blue leather and vinyl upholstery / Bring a Trailer
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III with dark blue leather and vinyl upholstery / Bring a Trailer
If you compared a Mark III and a Thunderbird side-by-side, some of the commonalities would become apparent, like the identically spaced instruments and nearly identical HVAC and radio controls …
1969 Ford Thunderbird 2-Door Landau with dark ivy gold cloth and vinyl upholstery / Classic & Collector Cars
… or the overhead bank of warning lights between the sun visors, which was the same in both cars:
1969 Ford Thunderbird 2-Door Landau / Classic & Collector Cars
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III — the overhead lights are for seat belts, door ajar, headlamps, and trunk open / Bring a Trailer
However, I don’t think many people made that kind of direct comparison, and the T-Bird was already in a pretty upscale class, so no one seems to have been too put out by the occasional flashes of family resemblance.
1969 Ford Thunderbird 2-Door Landau with dark ivy gold cloth and vinyl upholstery / Classic & Collector Cars
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III with light blue cloth and vinyl upholstery / Bring a Trailer
As people have often reminded me, whatever I might think of the styling of the Mark III, it hit its intended audience like a blockbuster. The Mark III didn’t quite outsell the Eldorado in this generation, but it came awfully close (impressive given that Cadillac had about 50 percent more dealer franchises), and it was in very high demand.
1968 Cadillac Eldorado / Orlando Classic Cars
Perhaps the surest sign of that was the cars’ resale values: By July 1970, a 1969 Continental Mark III had a $450 edge over the similarly priced 1969 Eldorado in KBB trade-in allowance.
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III / Orlando Classic Cars
I’m still partial to the Eldorado, and I still think the Mark III is vulgar, but when considering both these cars as complete products, I have to concede that it was Lincoln, not Cadillac, that really brought their A-game.
Related Reading
Curbside Classic: 1968-1971 Lincoln Continental Mark III – Right On The Mark (by Paul N)
Vintage Reviews And Commentary: 1967-1968 Cadillac Eldorado – The King Of Cadillac From When Cadillac Was King (by GN)
Curbside Classic: 1968 Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado – Steak Knife (by Joseph Dennis)
Vintage M/T Review: 1970 Cadillac Eldorado Vs. Lincoln Continental Mark III – “Take Me To Beverly Hills” (by me)
Automotive History: 1972 Lincoln Continental Mark IV – Bunkie Knudsen Leaves His Mark (by me)
Princess Margaret, upon seeing the large diamond in the wedding ring Richard Burton had presented to Elizabeth Taylor, observed: “That really is the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen.” The actress offered to let the princess put it on her finger and watched her expression shift with her stunned silence. “Not so vulgar now is it?” she retorted. A “Thunderbird with a Rolls-Royce grill” really couldn’t be anything other than vulgar (on the basis people should buy one or the other) but it was what the market wanted and compared with some of the attempts at “neo-classical revivals” (1961 Imperial; Virgil Exner’s 1966 Duesenberg, the post-war Stutz Blackhawk), it verged on restrained.
An interesting comparison is that the Mark III was a very literal transmission of the styling of the 1969 Continental coupe onto the T-bird bones. The only significant differences are the face and the spare tire hump.
I think the 1970 and 1971 models present a bit better. The leather interiors are even plusher and more wrinkled, and incorporated real wood veneer, as you mentioned in your piece. They also have hidden wiper blades and a three-spoke rim-blow steering wheel (eliminating the old-fashioned-looking horn ring). The power seat controls also move to the doors for 1970, which is a big usability improvement.
The only downside of the 70 and 71 models is the rather generic-looking wheel covers in place of the awesome turbine-style covers on the 1969. I added the 1969 style covers to my 1970 model and even though they were technically incorrect, they looked so much better.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/cars-of-a-lifetime/coal-1970-lincoln-continental-mark-iii-the-plot-twist/
As alluded to in the article, the Mark and Eldo were more focused on styling (look); interior surfaces (touch): and ride comfort (feel).
If GM had wanted to take the Eldo to a higher standard, a coil spring or independent rear suspension would have raised the car to GT cruiser level (a la Rivera). But the real focus was razor sharp styling, a Cadillac strong point.
As for the Lincoln, there was little room to make significant differences in handling or performance. The car was a clone of an existing frame (a Lido trade mark), and it was going to stay that way.
Also noted, each hit their intended target. The volume may not be so great, but the margin for each was two to three times what a LTD or Caprice would net.
That’s the whole focus in the auto industry; cash flow and margin.
Each made a significant contribution to GM & Ford.
What more can you say.
I just came here to say that those photos from BaT are absolutely fantastic. I see that they wound up selling that car for $22,000, but the seller must have spent about 1/4 of that staging the photos and detailing the car. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a vinyl roof look so good!
I Like the Lincoln. AND I like the Eldorado mentioned.
I have a 77 Mark V, Good shape, 460, New Dual exhaust. Turbine wheels, not registered yet, (I have some current housing tasks to deal with at the moment. I gotta get some pics. Looks very similar to this File photo.
Sorry, maybe this will work..
In hindsight, I wonder if there were potential buyers who were gun shy about the “new/unproven” FWD technology in the Eldorado (and Toronado) such that it might have pushed them towards a Mark III (or Riviera). As you suggested, the market for such cars was successful men in their mid-40s to 60s, who were perhaps too conservative to pivot to a new technology in their luxury cars.
Hemming has an article on the Mark III without the until roof. The transformation is stunning
FTA: “Only 95 of the 30,842 of the 1969 Mark IIIs built had factory deleted tops and according to Ford’s records via the Marti Report, only one of the 95 was finished in Medium Aqua Metallic.
https://www.hemmings.com/stories/a-vinyl-roof-delete-completely-transforms-the-character-of-this-1969-lincoln-continental-mark-iii/
I think the “Without Vinyl” looks Cleaner/ Crisper.
Funny that the car in that Link (or “Linc”) has Plate that even says ‘NO VINYL’.
I agree completely; Ford nailed it with the Mk III, in every way given the intended target market (certainly not jaded 16 year-old me at the time).
Ironically the Eldorado’s problem was…Bill Mitchell. He had his personal preferences and a need to impress with his beloved knife-edge styling. But it didn’t work nearly as well as the Mk. III for the intended target. The Eldo was out of touch; 1967 was already well into the Brougham Era and the Eldo was somewhere else. The Mk. III nailed it, given the way design trends in cars as well as interior design were going.
And the gen2 Eldo failed again, even worse. The back-to-back failure of the gen1 and gen2 Eldorado to nail the proper design for the times and the market was a serious black eye for Cadillac and Bill Mitchell.
The “Ford Face” and look was in the ascendency; too bad they liked it for too long.
When I worked at the used car lot, I got to drive a ’69, trade-in, right out of the local retirement community (King City, OR). Let me tell you those (relatively) pre-smog 460s were a force to be reckoned with. Threw that tank around like a sack of taters. Effortless quiet cruising…was thinking about buying it but waited too long, it sold basically overnight. Sigh…
It is my opinion that Cadillac increased the displacement of the Eldorado engine to 500CID to stay competitive with the Mark III’s 460.
Watch what this guy did with his 69 Mark III.
My initial years being very GM centric, Ford luxury interiors came across very lounge lizard to me. Stale cigarette smoke and Aqua Velva likely part of the ambiance. Ford could have taken a que from the 1967 Imperial Crown Coupe Mobile Director and modified it into a little cocktail table in the back seat!
I see more English lounge in it now, than lizard. I like that Ford offered something distinct from the GM approach – variety being the spice and all.
I’d love to have a ’68 Eldorado and a ’70 Mark III in my garage – the best years of these cars. The color combos on the cars in this post are icing on the cake – just perfect for them!
Such a stunning car in nearly every way to my eyes. That red Eldo is quite nice as well.
I completely agree with the assertions in this post – the Mark III is, and was, vulgar; the exterior of the original Eldorado was a much cleaner expression of modern design; and the interior of the Lincoln was far more impressive in fit and finish, if not purity of design. Ford undoubtedly had its finger on the pulse of the market, at least as it existed in the late 1960s. The Mark series went on to set the pace for Broughamtastic excess that tarnished American luxury cars for the next 20+ years.
In the end, though, I wonder whether GM had the last laugh, at least as far as interior design goes. The loose-pillow look popularized by the 1972 Oldsmobile 98 Regency became the style icon for the Brougham era and, as such, could also be considered a triumph of the product planners. Interestingly, though, it wasn’t Cadillac that lead GM and the industry in that direction, but rather a middle-priced sister brand with some upscale pretensions aimed squarely at Cadillac.
One of the individuals who contributed to the Mark III interior design was Herman C. Brunn. If the name association isn’t instant, he was the son of Herman A, Brunn of the pre-war custom coachbuilder Brunn & Co. Buffalo, NY that bodied Classic Era Lincoln L, K, and KB. Herman C. has joined Ford Design after the coachbuilder closed in 1941. He was schooled in luxury car design, took his early training at Kellner in Paris.
The Mark III was absolutely a product planners hit. One can imagine the discussions regarding what features should be included to make the Mark III resonate with its target buyers. The neo-classic features were at that point only 30-40 years in the past but still readily recalled by those who were now affluent enough act on fulfilling their desire for a luxury car. Iacocca read the demographic perfectly, just as he had for the Mustang. The Mark II had been a vanity project and paean to their late father but the Mark III was simply pragmatic proof of concept as a profitable business model.
The 1967-’70 Cadillac Eldorado design was far more sophisticated design than the Mark III, a designer’s design. The distilled essence of Cadillac design ethic. Although it harks to the Classic Era, but it does so without laying on the cliches everywhere to remind the viewer that it is a Luxury Car. Razor-edged and tailored, but not stuffy, simply elegant. Mitchell should have known Classic Era interior design well enough to have had the Eldorado outfitted like a 1930’s Bentley 4-1/4 liter sport saloon.
I guess that I’m a vulgarian, and I make no apologies for that. When the Mark III debuted I thought that it was the most beautiful car ..ever. I was sure that they would become valued collectibles, and I was sure that I would certainly buy one when I was in a position to buy a gently used example.
For some reason they never generated much interest among collectors, and I went with Cadillac when I bought my first three year old Cadillac, my ’77 CdV. I found that car to be more interesting to me at the time.
I also preferred the original El Do with the hidden headlights, the following face lifts lost a lot of the magic, and the new ’71 was a total shocker. Yeah, but vulgarian that I am, I would have owned one.. eventually. The interior of the El Do wasn’t a big step up from a Riviera. which did not convey the image of a luxury car, but the RWD chassis was simple and no mystery to me.
I think that the styling of the Mark interior was nicer and more plush, plus Lincoln quality was superior to Cadillac in my mind.
Nowadays I tend to stay away from big, gas guzzling old cars with complicated electric and vacuum operated features.
In 1970 my Dad bought a gently used 1969 Mark, maroon with a black vinyl top and black leather interior for my Stepmother. They were partners in leasing a nice restaurant next to a Quality Inn. He then tired of his 1968 Corvette and bought a new 1970 triple black Mark from a Ford dealership in Charlotte (90 miles NW of Bennettsville, SC). Sadly thinks went south and both Marks disappeared and he ended up driving a Mercury Marquis for a few months, loaned to him by a generous friend. A few years later he bought a several year old beautiful 1971 triple white with the high back seats. I’d go on to sell it via Hemming’s Auto News when I was at the Pentagon (captain then) to a wise-guy from Newark. One of my co-workers in my car (Nissan Maxima) met him and his guy at Exit 1 of the NJTP and he had the cash in hand. John and I got the money and signed over the title and got the fxxk out of there and didn’t stop until we were at the mid-rest area in Maryland on I-95. I wished I would have bought that Mark and saved it.
There is a centuries-old tradition of stonemasons carving at least one gargoyle of someone in power (often someone disliked) onto the high exterior wall tops of cathedrals: I feel sure this car is Catholic Iacocca’s secret monument by the designers.
The Lincoln Monument (to bad taste) would’ve been a better name. Sure as eggs no one on the Continent was buying these (but then again, in accordance with the infamous epithet, no one went broke selling them to Americans, either).
No one on the Continent was buying??? What about Frog One in the French Connection!!!
Well, alright, one was, but it seems they’re homing, so it returned to its natural environment anyway. With the optional Heroin Pack.
The actual French Connection seizure that inspired the movie involved a Citroën DS rather than a Lincoln.
I recall being visibly impressed when they first came out in 1969. Have always liked the 1st Gen.
“The car was a clone of an existing frame (a Lido trade mark), and it was going to stay that way.”
It was actually a Ford Finance Dept. trademark.
This ability to do derivatives off a platform on a tight budget paid dividends when Lee went to Chrysler.
Mk III was Ford’s first NAAO vehicle with standard radial tires. Supplied by Michelin. Ford France provided a tire expert to be resident with the Dearborn development team. He reported to a Dearborn supervisor. He submitted an expense report, one item he was requesting reimbursement for was… wait for it… a prostitute. US supervisor questioned this line item. Frog Ford guy explained: “I am far from home for a long time. I am a man. I am French.” There was some dispute among the engineers in the X Garage as to whether he got that reimbursement.
True story told to me by the late great Dick Rader, a Ford Brake Engineer.