Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
The 2018 Lincoln Navigator SUV
Editorial note: Business Insider will name its 2018 Car of the Year on Monday, November 19. Each day this week, we're taking another look at the five vehicles that were runners-up that were selected from a pool of 15 finalists. The first vehicle up is the 2018 Lincoln Navigator.
- The original luxury SUV is all-new for 2018.
- It embodies Lincoln's "quiet luxury" philosophy on a massive scale.
- It's so popular that in January, Lincoln dealers struggled to keep up with demand.
- We tested it for a week, and it was more than up to every challenge we threw at it
There's a mighty new Lincoln Navigator in town, and we really put it through its paces in the New York and New Jersey area as winter bore down on the region.
The Navigator, around since the 1990s, is the original luxury SUV. If the recently arrived new Continental is the flagship sedan of Ford's revived premium marque, then the Navigator is the dreadnought of the fleet. This is the fourth generation of the big guy. And it got off to a great start. Lincoln reported in January that Navigator sales were up 132% from January of 2017.
We saw the vehicle for the first time as a flamboyant, nautical-themed concept vehicle at the New York Auto Show in 2016; Lincoln officially debuted the new Navigator at the 2017 show. It was only a matter of time before we got our hands on this behemoth for some test time behind the wheel. That happened in December.
Here's how it went: