CAR WARS Bentley’s Pissed About the New Lincoln Continental Concept
By now, most of you have seen the new Lincoln Continental Concept Lincoln showed off at this year’s New York International Auto Show. And if you haven’t, it’s the car that’s directly above this paragraph. Good looking car right? Right.
While, it’s not really the drastic departure that Lincoln needs to reinvigorate the brand, it’s definitely a step forward in the right direction. Well, at least it is so long as you don’t talk with Bentley.
After the Lincoln Continental Concept debuted, a few people within the industry remarked how much it resembled the Bentley Flying Spur. Now, a lot of cars these days look a lot alike.
However this Continental Concept might have taken that copying thing a bit too far. It caused so much of a huff, that Bentley’s own Chief Designer Luc Donckerwolke called out Lincoln on Facebook.
According to Donckerwolke, “I would have called it Flying Spur concept and kept the four round lights… I thought this was only done in China? Finally a Bentley for the masses though.” Donckerwolke continued with asking Lincoln’s Design Director David Woodhouses, “do you want us to send the product tooling?” He went on to talk with Car Design News and stated that “This behavior is not respectable. Building a copy like this is giving a bad name to the car design world.”
Here’s my only defense of Lincoln though. Much of the car design world isn’t based on design anymore, but rather crash standards and aerodynamics. Many cars are looking like one another these days.
However, the similarities between the new Lincoln Continental Concept and the Bentley Flying Spur go beyond such small similarities and are definitely questionable. What do you all think? Did Lincoln just rip off Bentley?