Luxury versions of ordinary Fords have produced mixed results over the years. The Lincoln Versailles became (in)famous as an upscale Granada that never quite justified its price, while three decades later the Mark LT attempted the same formula with America’s best-selling pickup, the Ford F-150. Unlike the Versailles, though, the Mark LT had a much stronger foundation—and as our family discovered, it proved to be far more than just a fancy badge. Not that any of that helped the Mark LT, which lasted from 2006 to 2008 in the States.
In 2017, my father decided to purchase a truck and trailer to pull his track car, a 1995 BMW M3. He did not want to spend a lot, as he did not expect to use the truck all that often, and it did not matter to him at the time if the truck was all that good. I scoured Craigslist for a suitable truck, turning up my old 735i, per my last entry, but no suitable trucks. He then turned to CarMax, which had few better options.
There were really only two, for that matter. One was a Chevrolet Avalanche. The other was a 2008 Lincoln Mark LT—a rebadged eighth generation Ford F-150. These were not great options, but one was decidedly better than the other. I hated the Avalanche, so I did my best to inform him about the 5.3-liter Chevrolet V8’s tendency to guzzle oil. I also left out the 5.4 Triton’s tendency to throw spark plugs, which probably sealed the deal. He came home with the Lincoln, and thankfully I was spared having to look at the Avalanche every day.
It is difficult to mention the Lincoln Mark LT without drawing comparisons to the Lincoln Versailles of the 1970s. The Versailles was named by Inside Line as being one of the 100 worst cars of all time in its 2011 article. For the uninitiated, the Versailles was Ford’s response to the Cadillac Seville—a Nova-based compact luxury car that made a lot of money for Cadillac. While GM gave the Seville distinct styling from its blue-collar basis, Ford slapped a hump on the trunk of a Granada, and that was about it. However, Ford did improve on the Granada–just not enough to justify the ludicrous price tag on the Versailles. The Versailles had disk brakes all around, clear coat, and pretty much every option you could have. It was a marginal improvement on the Granada, taking it from being an overweight, malaise-era Falcon to a mediocre car.
The Mark LT was the same for the Ford F-150. Every Mark LT was a well-optioned, marginally improved F-150, and that was not a bad thing to be. The F-150 has been the best-selling truck in America for almost 50 years for a reason, after all. The interior was a very nice place to be, although the seats were not particularly supportive for all drivers, and my father often complained that his shoulders hurt after driving in it for long distances. The back seat was also weirdly positioned, such that it felt too close to the floor. The powertrain was competent enough, too. The 5.4-liter Triton V8 was smooth and made reasonable torque and power. The four-speed automatic—a variant of Ford’s AOD from the 1980s—was astonishingly good, and I have nothing bad to say about it. It had four-wheel drive, and that made it useful for trips to the shooting range as I got deeper into shooting. It had every capability as a truck that a similarly-equipped F-150 had, and that included a towing capacity of 8,700 pounds—just enough to tow my dad’s car hauler. Unfortunately, it was barely adequate to tow the car hauler at such high altitude.
My father did not care for towing in the Lincoln, and the car hauler saw only a few trips before being permanently parked in the backyard, relegated to storage use. However, the Lincoln continued to be useful to us. In 2017, I applied to UNM Law for the fall semester. It turned out that, after six months working customer service at Smiths and living in my parents’ basement, and having few friends, prospects, or and little to do other than shoot and reload the same 20 7x57mm cartridges over and over again, I no longer cared if I went into debt to build a life. Time has proven this to be the right decision.
In August 2017, I loaded up my car with most of my things, and my parents followed me in the Lincoln with the rest of them, and I moved to Albuquerque into Redondo Hall—then the graduate student housing on UNM campus. It was not very popular among graduate students, and the next year, it would stop being the designated spot for graduate students to live. Not that I cared. From then to March 2020, I took to borrowing the Lincoln each break in order to move my stuff to and from Albuquerque. The Lincoln seemed well-suited to the task. It was easy to drive, comfortable, and practical. It was also surprisingly popular in Albuquerque, and I got more thumbs up and compliments than I did in any of the other cars I drove while there.
The pandemic hit in March 2020, during my last semester in law school. Spring break turned into an extended closure and order for students living on-campus to vacate the premises. So early one morning, I saddled up the Lincoln, made the drive from Los Alamos to Albuquerque in very good time due to the near-lack of traffic on the roads, and stuffed everything I had into the bed, and made my way back home. The whole ordeal took about six hours, after which I received a refund from the school for the semester’s rent.
Not long after that, my father, sick of being stuck at home but mindful of the need to keep distance from others, bought a travel trailer. This was a good idea, but not an original one and travel trailers became scarce almost overnight. He secured a fairly small Jayco that, due to the overwhelming increase in demand, had been slapped together and pushed out the door with all the care of a malaise-era Chrysler. It was well within the Lincoln’s towing capacity, and my father expected that it would be trivial for the Lincoln to pull it. While he was not wrong, he felt he was. The Lincoln could not maintain more than about 60 MPH going uphill with the trailer attached. He also complained that the Lincoln did not feel as stable with the trailer as the F-350 had felt with a longer trailer. My father solved the stability problem, mostly, with a stabilizer bar for towing. However, he felt there was no solution to the power problem and rejected outright my proposal that he install one of the many supercharger kits for the 5.4-liter Triton V8. This would have been the end of our time with the Lincoln in normal times, but the shortage of new and used vehicles during the pandemic meant the Lincoln would stay with us for three more years.
During those three years, I made good use of the Lincoln. During the initial phase of the pandemic, it ferried me multiple times a day to go shooting in the canyons, usually between classes. I still had to finish out my semester at UNM, but I had the freedom to do it remotely. What this meant is that I would set up in the workshop, mute my microphone, and set about preparing that day’s cartridges for shooting, paying passive attention to the classes I was taking in the background. When a particular class was done, I would take the cartridges I had made, load them in the Lincoln, drive out to the range, shoot them off, and then return in time for my next class. Rinse and repeat. Within a month, I had shot off 500 rounds of .45 Colt, which should give you a feel for where my attention was directed. I took to gardening around this time as well, and the Lincoln played a pivotal role in that too. Bags of fertilizer were loaded into its bed to try to coax some life into our sandy, barely useable soil. It must have worked, as I managed to grow a fair number of tomatoes, cucumbers, and radishes.
The Lincoln would stay with us until it was replaced in 2023 with a then-new F-150, with the 3.5 liter EcoBoost and ten-speed automatic. While the F-150 is a far more capable towing vehicle, it does not feel as much like a truck as the Lincoln did.
Related CC reading:
Lincoln Mark LT – A Study On Silly Pickups
2002 Lincoln Blackwood – Versailles, Part II
That Lincoln is in beautiful shape. I inherited my father’s 2006 F150 Lariat in 2009 after his passing. It had the dreaded 5.4L engine as well and I had no long term plans for it as I wanted rid of it ASAP before it became a money pit.
After a few ears with it, driving 3 kids to and from University with their worldly goods, I fell in love with the utility and surprising reliability of the F150. I have put very little maintenance into it beyond oil changes (frequent oil changes will keep the VCT’s free from fouling) and has it’s original cam phasors and second set of plugs ( get the engine hot before pulling them…)
I still use it as my daily driver and the rust is starting around the wheel wells but everything still works including the A/C. I’ve got 330K on the old girl and I know I’ll be hard pressed to let her go when the time comes.
Great article and wonderful truck!
On my last business trip before I retiring in 2014, I visited a potential client in New Mexico. We stayed in ABQ and drove to Los Alamos to the client’s location. That’s quite a climb. I was slowly catching up with a Ford SuperDuty with a big slide-in camper and pulled left to pass it in the rental car. Not so easy, and I commented how impressed I was by the speed of the truck. The local sales guy noted the V10 badge on the truck’s front fender: “I have one of those” he said, “Those V10’s will pass anything but a gas station.” That’s what your dad needed for towing.
…all the care of a malaise-era Chrysler
Well, that’s a damning statement. Good one, though. Visions of the Consumer Reports review of the 1979 Dodge St. Regis where they had to buy two because the first one couldn’t stay running long enough to complete their tests.
Who’d ever believe that some of Chrysler’s best years for quality were when Fiat took over. Before the merger with PSA, of course.
I had exactly zero problems with a 2 valve 5.4 in my Expedition. Zero mechanical problems anyways. The towing behaviour was just not up to snuff up hill. Maybe it was the 3.21 gears or the smooth but also high geared 4R100 transmission. Or the general porkiness of the thing. To the point I think the 4.2 V6 5 speed in the F150 was almost preferable to tow with.
3.5 eco boost is in another league altogether pulling wise.
One of the strangest eras, from the late 1990s the early ’10s. From Prowlers and PT Cruisers to retro-design reboots (5th-gen Camaro and Mustang and Challenger/Charger) to a Ford truck with a Lincoln badge. Cadillac did it as well with Chevy’s Avalanche called the Escalade EXT.
It was almost like revisiting the 1970s when auto manufacturers were confused on where to go during the oil crisis giving us weird stuff like what AMC trotted out (Gremlin that looked like a short Dutch shoe and the goldfish bowl on wheels called the Pacer).
The Mark LT wasn’t quite as big a fiasco as the Blackwood but it was a flop in the market. The psychology of truck buyers, favored a fancy Ford over a Lincoln. Consequently the next generation used the Mark LT trim and options to create the F150 Platinum, which has sold very well. According to Wikipedia the 2009-2014 generation did have a Lincoln Mark LT in Mexico. The SUV market was more interested in nameplates since the Lincoln Navigator has been a solid seller and the Cadillac Escalade sells even better.
I wonder what spec you had, or how big your hills are? My 2002 F150 with the two valve 5.4 Triton and a factory tow package hauled a 6000lb Lance trailer from Redmond to Klamath Falls without difficulty, although I did have to floor it on hill and got 8.75 mpg. I did have the usual ejecting spark plug issue when I bought it in 2020 but reman heads and careful installation solved that.
I did rent an F150 XLT Super Crew in 2008 and liked it but I would avoid the 3 valve Triton generation now. I also avoid the crew cab because I have gotten more utility from the 8′ bed than the back seat in my Super Cab (it’s been great for storage).
The hills are steep and the elevation is high. We’re sitting at 7,500 feet, more or less. That means a power loss of 22% to altitude. On top of that, the the main hill road is a massive climb, as Totavi sits at about 5,700 feet. Going out of town is pretty easy, but coming back is hard. On top of that, getting into Santa Fe means a fairly steep climb by Tesuque. Albuquerque is at about 5,300 feet, and so any time they went there, the climb back up was about 2,000 feet. Sometimes they’d go to Chama, which sits at 7,800. Red River is 8,700 feet, and getting there means going down to Espanola first, which sits at about 5,500 feet. All of this is to say, getting anywhere means a sharp drop down and up again.
Klamath is a good 1,000 feet lower than Los Alamos any way you slice it. At worst, you’re only down 18%, if not 12%. I suspect in the flatlands and at sea level these trucks are perfectly adequate for towing large loads. But here in the mountains, I think they’re a little outmatched.
Yeah it sounds like forced induction is the way to go and a turbo diesel would be optimal. Apart from Steens Mountain there are very few roads in Oregon above 6000′.
Even if it’s an automotive rarity, a vehicle will show up in SoCal. I used to see these trucks around here. I caught this one several years ago on the freeway. With tool boxes and a repair livery on the sides, the Mark LT appeared to be in good use.
7×57? What were you shooting, an old Mauser or something? Among all of the 8x57s I owned I had one that was chambered for 7×57, I seem to recall that it was Spanish, maybe?!?
1895 Chilean Mauser, yes. I bought a pair of them for $400 bucks in 2016. I still have them, although I don’t shoot as much as I used to.