Lincoln MKS AWD Philadelphia PA

BY PATRICK BEDARD

To your list of things that will never happen, you can add one more: The hot-blooded pilotes of this staff will never rank this new Lincoln above a BMW, any BMW, in a comparison test. But the Supreme Court is not the only enclave of divided opinions; the contrarians among us think Ford has something going on here.

Consider the driver’s office. BMW and Benz, not to mention Honda and Acura designers—and Jaguar, too, now that we think of it—could learn much from a few hours in this Lincoln. The wide-screen dash display is so bright and legible you could read it with patches on both eyes. And the driver interface—the buttons or knobs or joysticks or what the Ultimate Driving Machine calls iDrive (i for infuriation?)—seems to explain itself at a glance here. The MKS combines a touch screen with just the right number of hard buttons and, even better, knobs. They’re all positioned high where you can see them, on the center stack in a remarkably simple array, angled just right for easy use. Strong, white, sans-serif characters on dark backgrounds encourage info to leap into your mind, whether from the screen or the dials of the cluster. Nothing blanks out when you put on your polarized sunglasses, either. Eat your hearts out, Benz and BMW drivers.

Better still, Lincoln designers had the less-is-more good sense to stand back and let function take the starring role. No aurora borealis shimmering in the dials or color-of-the-day lighting in the cup holders. Just leaping info. In the category of ergonomics, the MKS earns maximum points.

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