Reinventing Lincoln

On his very first day as the new chief designer of the Lincoln line from Ford Motor, Max Wolff had, in his words, an “oh, shit moment.” Touring Ford’s design studio in Dearborn, Mich., last January, Wolff made his way to the latest model of the MKZ, Lincoln’s top-selling car, which Ford hopes will finally reverse decades of decline at Lincoln and catapult it into a pantheon with Audi, BMW, and Lexus. Trouble was, the MKZ was a dud. The boxy, narrow model had doors identical to the Ford Fusion, the carmaker’s family sedan for the common man. Its prominent grille with cascading chrome ribs had the look of your grandfather’s mustache, and its boxy headlights evoked Milton Berle’s eyeglasses. Wolff, a 39-year-old, faux-hawk-sporting Aussie, turned to the car’s designer, Solomon Song, and asked: “What were you thinking?”

As Wolff recalls, Song said: “We’ve sort of been waiting for you to turn up so that we can do something different.”