#BlackLabel

Do not adjust your monitor. This full-size SUV is indeed painted something other than the piano black of livery companies and Uber drivers trying to emulate livery companies. I didn’t pick anyone up at an airport while driving this beast, nor did I drop passengers at a tony downtown restaurant.

It says something about our world when large luxury SUVs have become the default conveyance for the well-heeled. But this 2018 Lincoln Navigator Black Label turns that idea on its head, as beneath the the many plush layers is a proper truck, ready to haul in style.

A few days ago, official photos surfaced of the next-generation Lincoln MKC, showing a crossover that had ditched its krill-hungry maw in favor of a new grille in line with treatments found on the Continental and Navigator. Lincoln announced that the refreshed MKC will be shown this week in L.A.

Yesterday, Lincoln dropped a quick teaser video on Twitter, showing several seconds of pavement followed by the lower half of a chrome wheel. Promising a vehicle that will “make a lasting impression,” the video leaves us pondering a question: If Lincoln has officially shown us the 2019 MKC, what else could it possibly have in store?

I still remember it as though it were yesterday. My father, nearly exactly the same age that I am today, pulling up into the driveway of our suburban home in his new company car just slowly enough for everybody in the neighborhood to see.

As a cherubic five year old, I looked down from the window of the bedroom that I shared with my older brother, feeling the same sort of excitement that I normally reserved for things like the very few Christmas mornings that I had experienced thus far. Not because I was necessarily that excited, mind you, but because everybody else in the house was. The buzz was palpable. My dad was bringing home the car that signified that his new position as the president of a brokerage firm, the car that nearly everybody in the early 1980s said was their dream car.

What was the dream car in question? If you were alive in 1983, you already know. It was the Lincoln Town Car, resplendent in the color of a Carolina sky that my ever politically correct mother nicknamed “Polack Blue.” To own a Town Car in the time of Perestroika was to let everybody else know that you were somebody. That you had made it.

Say it with me in the Don LaFontaine voice:

IN A WORLD…

WHERE EVERY SOURCE OF “PREMIUM” HAS BEEN EXHAUSTED…

AND MASS-PRODUCED GARBAGE IS REBRANDED AS LUXURY GOODS FOR AN INCREASINGLY FECKLESS, IGNORANT, AND NAIVE UPPER MIDDLE CLASS…

A BRAND SHALL RISE…