2002 Lincoln Blackwood

The monochromatic Lincoln Blackwood was first conceived in the late 1990s as a proposed luxury versison of the Ford F-150 Crew Cab, and was introduced in January 1999 at the North American International Auto Show, and it garnered enthusiasm among onlookers who at the time just found out that Lincoln had actually assembled a pickup truck. It was also the first Lincoln to be produced outside of Michigan since 1958, in Claycomo, Missouri. However, this was at the time when pickup trucks weren't intended to be luxurious, and not only it resulted it in being an oddball upon late delivery in October 2001, two months after the start of production over Magna Steyr's cargo box supply problem in which Ford had froze its contact with over that issue, it flopped disastrously, selling only a measly 3,356 units in a single model year in the U.S., and until 2003 in Mexico, with production ending in the end of 2002. The high cost of $52,500 (around $74,022 in 2018 dollars), and the choice of only a single engine and drivetrain (RWD) choice was available exacerbated its sales woes that made it the shortest-lived production Lincoln model, and its luxury features also toned down its utilitarianism, whereas the Cadillac Escalade EXT had a combination of both thanks to the availability of the 4WD drivetrain associated with pickup trucks. Lincoln tried to assemble another luxury pickup truck, the Mark LT, after learning from the Blackwood's failure for 2006, but it still wasn't the right time for luxury pickup trucks to catch the eye of buyers, and was pulled from the U.S. lineup after 2008, and soldiered on in Mexico until 2014. Now that we're seeing expensive, luxury pickup trucks like the Ford F-450 Limited enter dealer lots, and have F-150s of the Platinum trim level stay in production and remain on sale without a problem, then I wouldn't be surprised if Lincoln makes a third attempt on a luxury pickup truck, and reviving the Blackwood name actually sounds like a possibility now that Lincoln is doing away with the "MK-(insert letter[s] here)" name scheme in favor for traditional names.

Even rarer were the fifty units built for the 2001 Neiman Marcus Spring Catalog, in which the brand's logo is stitched into the headrests, among more luxury features like a rear console lid wrapped in leather where a 7-inch Panasonic wide-screen CD/DVD player is present. They cost $58,800 (a staggering $82,904 today) per truck.

Image date: July 2008