#LincolnLS

Last time on Buy/Drive/Burn, we checked out three C-body offerings from General Motors and forced you to choose one. The luxury flowed freely, and only limited salt was dashed upon its splendor.

Today we follow the same form with Ford, looking at offerings from three different brands riding on the same platform. Crack open a DEW and let’s get to it.

Much has been written about Stockholm Syndrome. It’s been critical to the plotlines of countless books, movies, and television shows: someone gets taken hostage and yet inexplicably sympathizes with and develops positive feelings towards their captor. I truly believe this thought process extends to inanimate objects as well. Case in point: a colleague of mine refuses to give up her Blackberry. My automotive equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome is Lincoln … ahem, excuse me … the Lincoln Motor Company.

To the delight of certain other TTAC contributors, my past is littered with examples of big Fords: five Crown Vics (including a wagon) and a Grand Marquis. I know, right? Most of these vehicles darkened my driveway for a maximum of six or seven months and were, without exception, terrible examples of the breed. The floor of my second Crown Vic was so rusty that the carpet eventually caught fire from resting on the exhaust and filled the cabin with apocalyptic amounts of dark smoke. My solution after I put out the flames? Cut off the exhaust. My neighbours hated me.

Not long ago, we had a Lincoln LS Junkyard Find, and, of course, that means that we need to take a look at the Jaguar counterpart to this mostly-forgotten Jag-O-Lincoln: the S-Type.

It’s no sweat finding a junkyard S-Type these days, particularly when you look in a high-inventory-turnover San Francisco Bay Area yard, and so here’s a not-very-hooptie example I saw last month.

When I walk the rows of a big self-service yard with rapid inventory turnover, my eye is tuned to catch old and/or weird stuff, which means that newer interesting stuff tends to get overlooked. I’ve been trying to shoot more 21st-century Junkyard Finds lately, since our current century started quite a long time ago, but it was hearing that our own Crab Spirits had scored a cheap Lincoln LS with perfect interior and bad motor (he’s going to swap in a Toyota 1UZ engine, which strikes me as a fine idea) that got me looking for junked LSs. It turns out that finding such a car is extremely easy, so here’s one I saw in California recently.

Chris writes:

Hi, love the site. I want a play car, but my wife and I have to agree on the purchase.

First, the details on our current situation. My wife drives a 2001 Suburban with 120,000 miles on it. I’m driving a 96 Cherokee 4wd with a 5-speed and 90k on the meter. We’re both happy with our daily drivers.

What I’d like to have is a car with, say, 50-75k miles on it, maybe built in the mid-2000’s, that we could take on trips. Perhaps something less thirsty for $4/gallon gas than the other two vehicles. And I’d like to stay in the $7,000 to $12,000 range, with a preference for the lower end.

I’ve got it narrowed down to a few contenders: