This week Lincoln unveiled their redesigned 2024 Nautilus, bringing some design pride back to Detroit, versus what the competition is doing.
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Not only do I think it’s the only credible American competitor in the midsize luxury SUV space, I think it’s the best-looking. A midsize SUV is by definition cursed with weird proportions, and the class combatants (Audi’s Q5, BMW’s X3, Mercedes’ GLC-class, etc.) have tended to cope by randomly shrinking some aspects of their forms, yielding a visually jarring effect. In contrast, the new Nautilus does fool you into thinking it was purpose-designed, although it does in fact fit within a lineup of smaller (Corsair) and larger (Aviator) siblings with familial styling.
Sketch
Sheet metal
To be fair, the designers pulled this off by “borrowing” a trick from the Range Rover design team’s playbook: Blacking out everything above the beltline. This clever usage of color and surfacing, for which Range Rover’s designers deserve full credit, allows your eye to read the form as two individually pleasing proportions that have been mated in a purposeful way.
Which is not to say Lincoln’s designers haven’t introduced original elements. Viewing the car up close, it’s striking how sexy the door handles are. You really can’t see them in the overall shots, because they’re concealed with the trim at the beltline:
What you spot up close is that in two places, the ribbon-like trim briefly billows outwards. Concealed on the inside of the cavity this creates is a button that electronically de-latches the door when the handle is grasped.
That’s a nice detail, but the real jaw-dropper is on the inside. There is no instrument cluster. Instead Lincoln’s interior designers have completely jettisoned the traditional I.P., and introduced a stunning, sweeping screen that flows across the entire width of the dashboard.
The screen starts right at the bottom of the windshield, keeping the information on display as close as possible to the road. And in another nice UX touch, the designers decided they didn’t want the driver having to peer through the steering wheel to see anything. Thus they actually flattened the top of the steering wheel to avoid blocking the screen. (And yes, Lincoln assured me, heavy ergonomic testing was done to ensure this squircled wheel behaves the way you want it to.)
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You could be fooled into thinking the wraparound areas to each side of the dashboard screen are, themselves, more screen, but in fact they’re just lit panels.
In a brief demo at the launch event Jake Isaac, Lincoln’s Nautilus Brand Manager, showed us how easy it is to arrange the screen’s components—or temporarily disappear most of them, if desired:
The new Nautilus will arrive in showrooms early next year. And I imagine that by that time, competing brands will start developing their own full-width dashboard screens; after sitting behind one, you’ll find standard instrument clusters look positively dated.
Source: core77