Cars.com's Kelsey Mays walks you through the 2009 Lincoln MKS at the L.A. Auto Show.
Transcript
(light Rock music) Hi, I'm Kelsey Mays for Cars.com. We're here at the LA Auto Show with the 2009 Lincoln, MKS. Now the MKS is Lincoln's full-size flagship and it competes with cars like the Cadillac STS and the Acura RL.
Under the hood is a standard V6 engine. Lincoln says that in the next year or so, a turbo-charged V6 will offer V8 like power. In back, the rear doesn't seem quite as in your face, as upfront with curvy, smaller tail lights and a wraparound bumper. Inside you can see a few more similarities with the Taurus. You've got the power mirror switches, the door locks, and some of the buttons along the steering wheel, but still it's a fairly upscale interior. The seats have this sort of perforated material in the leather. We don't really think that's gonna look so good in a full on luxury car, but they're comfortable enough. We'll take you through some of the high-tech features in a second video, but for now let's look at some of the storage space. The center armrest here actually comes forward, which is nice. It comes forward in two separate areas, so if the passenger wants to leave their arm there and you wanna move this forward for your side, that's a nice little feature. Unfortunately, when you open it up inside, there's hardly any room in there. The dashboard has a leather kind of covering on the top, and that's a nice feature to look at. Unfortunately, when you feel it up close, it's pretty hard to the touch and it doesn't seem as high quality as the rest of the interior. The center controls have a decent quality to them, but some of the buttons are still a little bit too small for us. And certainly Lincoln buyers may think they're a little too small for everyday use. There's a lot of Chrome here. You'll notice the center panel has a little bit of flexing here and there, but again, this is probably a pre-production vehicle, so we'd expect some of these things to be ironed out by the time this car hits dealerships. Now the backseat is much roomier than you'll find in a lot of mid-sized luxury cars. I've got plenty of leg room and even quite enough head room. There's a panoramic moon roof, which is covered up right now, but even as it comes back over your head, you'll notice that there's a slight rise in the ceiling that preserves headroom pretty well. In fact, there's heated rear seats standard, but the controls themselves feel awfully cheap and so do the cup holders in the center console. The trunk is pretty large. We'd like to see a larger opening, but inside it's actually pretty big and it's got some space saving measures like strut hinges instead of arms. At first glance, the MKS doesn't seem quite as high quality as some of its competitors out there. but it will win Lincoln buyers over with value. Lincoln says front and rear heated seats and things like Xenon headlights, and alloy wheels that are 18 inches in diameter are standard. And the car starts under $38,000. It's pretty roomy too. So it'll definitely be a good addition to this segment. <v Male Speaker>For additional information on this car or any other go to www.Cars.com and our blog 'Kicking Tires'.
