Gullwinged Lincoln Navigator Seeks To Reclaim Luxury SUV Market

This brand-new concept hopes to launch a luxe Lincoln comeback.

Lincoln aims to recapture the luxury SUV market it invented in 1997 with the original Navigator, grabbing attention at the New York International Auto Show with a dramatic new Navigator concept featuring enormous gullwing doors. 

Disappointingly for fans of flip-up doors, the gullwings are only for show on the concept and will not appear on the planned production version. “The doors won’t make it,” Lincoln’s chief designer David Woodhouse, told industry trade journal Automotive News. “We’re being quite clear about that. We did it to really show off the interior.”

Which the gaping apertures accomplish admirably, even if they doubtless compromise the integrity of the body stiffness and add weight in a vehicle the company is expected to actually lighten through the use of the same kind of aluminum body panels already seen on the F-150 pickup truck.

The Navigator follows the same hushed blue theme inside and out that designer Woodhouse employed on the Continental concept last year. The Storm Blue color conveys the same soothing atmosphere that Lincoln seeks to make its signature “quiet comfort” to stand apart from raucous Teutonic performance rockets and the brashly imposing Escalade.

 “It feels like our competitors are in the business of scaring people,” Woodhouse said in Automotive News. “It’s a very different business that we want to be in.”

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