Introduction

There are still only two choices in the traditional American luxury car segment of the market, the Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham and the Lincoln Town Car. No matter what Chrysler does, or the European or Japanese luxury car manufacturers, they will not venture into the neighborhood where the Brougham and the Town Car rule. There are still lots of American buyers who crave automobiles on a bigger-is-better basis, and it's for these buyers that Cadillac and Lincoln persist with large, rear-wheel-drive, V8-powered luxury sedans. For these buyers, size, weight, and interior roominess are the major reasons to buy, along with a desire to expend as little personal energy as possible in the act of getting from place to place. They want all the options there are to have, all the luxury touches that come as standard equipment in cars like these. For the manufacturers of such cars, this means a great deal of engineering time, continuous application of new luxury technologies, and very high costs, leading to sticker prices that are well above the $40,000 threshold for cars that many drivers look down upon as antiquated, plutocratic, and wasteful of energy resources.

Walkaround

We don't count ourselves as members of that group, however, especially in the case of the 1996 Lincoln Town Car. Rather, we see the Town Car as a vehicle equipped for a specialized mission, and one that does its job very well indeed. We have driven Town Cars from Washington to Florida on numerous occasions, and from Detroit to Los Angeles, and we have rented them countless times for week-long stays away from home, and we find them simply wonderful for long-distance runs with our favorite musical software playing. Music performance in this case is through a Ford JBL premium sound system with digital signal processing (DSP). We found the sound reproduction excellent up to about eight tenths of full volume. The current generation of Town Car has been with us since 1990, built on the same Panther platform as the Ford Crown Victoria and Mercury Grand Marquis. It got a completely new instrument panel, new headlamps, and an adjustable steering effort system for its fifth birthday last year. It also lost the vertical glass supports in its rear windows, allowing for the use of a much larger single pane in the rear doors and cleaning up the appearance a bit. So, while it hasn't lost any of its original bulk, its appearance is cleaner and crisper than a 1990 version. Not surprisingly, after a year of heavy investment, the 1996 Town Car is virtually identical to last year's car.

Interior Features

Accommodation is this car's long suit. It has huge doors, tall windows, deep leather-clad seats for five real people, plenty of storage space, and generous interior illumination for night maneuvers. The trunk is among the largest in the entire industry, wide enough and deep enough for all of your first apartment's furniture, with a remote-control decklid latch that can be operated from the car's key fob or an inside switch. One of the things we enjoyed most about this new Town Car is the modern-looking, high-function instrument panel, a panel which is fully integrated into the car from side to side. The curved, hooded instrument panel houses a combination of analog and digital instrumentation that's a long way from the old square-face instruments with beveled glass covers. The function display, safety check, and trip computer all make the car much more fun to drive on a long interstate highway journey, and everything is very accessible and easily understood. There's a minimum of chrome on the instrument panel, with some nice wood-look trim, and large control knobs that make you feel like you're operating, not fiddling. The 5-range back-and-cushion heated-seat system may be the best there is.