What driving? The people inside can do something else.

Lincoln L100 Concept

Lincoln L100 Concept

Lincoln L100 Concept

It uses a combination of metallic paint and frosted acrylic instead of chrome, with a “satin digital ceramic tricoat” so as to transition from a warm, soft white to a cool blue. The wheels themselves contain sensors and communicate about battery life. And the interior goes free of animal-derived materials, and the “digital floor” can help enhance the occupants’ moods. 

Lincoln L100 Concept

Perhaps most notably, the Model L100 Concept opens up like a flower—or comes out of its shell, your pick of loaded cliches—with side doors and roof all hinged at the rear of the vehicle. They all open on welcome, as part of a so-called Lincoln Embrace, provided of course in a futureworld in which there’s all the space to do so and the car parks itself away where door dings are an impossibility.

Lincoln doesn’t provide any technical details on the concept—not even dimensions—but it says that the Model L100 Concept uses “next generation battery cell and pack technologies, which will deliver game changing energy density and enable efficient, structural integration by treating the entire vehicle as a system.” The car looks visually very low, which might potentially simply be the result of its length and gigantic wheels. Cigar boats come to mind in profile.

Lincoln L100 Concept

Up until now, Lincoln has been treading toward EVs with caution. With its first couple of EVs, one of them a project with Rivian and the other an “elegant” EV based on the Mach-E, both now canceled, and its first plug-in model, the Lincoln Aviator Grand Touring plug-in hybrid more of a niche performance version, the Lincoln Corsair Grand Touring PHEV serves as a first plug-in introduction for the brand that’s more widely available. The brand now reportedly plans a full line of electric SUVs—although the first of those remains at least two years out.

Lincoln L100 Concept

Before you write this all off as a mere exercise for designers, keep in mind that, far-fetched technology aside, this is how a brand tests (and refines) where its styling is going in the future. The front-end styling does look a bit like that of the Lincoln Star electric SUV concept shown earlier this year; and the creative door/roof/frunk opening methods are something seen there, too. Is this the sort of Quiet Flight you’d climb into?