2017 Lincoln MKZ Spied

What It Is: A Lincoln MKZ sedan, spied wearing telling camouflage around its front and rear ends. While everything between the MKZ’s wheels looks unchanged, the swirly cover-up applied to the front fascia, headlights, and hood hides a series of styling tweaks that aim to bring Lincoln’s mid-size luxury sedan in line with the newly debuted Continental flagship.

Why It Matters: The 2017 Continental, which was displayed as a concept at this year’s New York auto show, gave form not only to Lincoln’s swagger, but also its new design language. (Here are recent spy photos of the production Continental.) It may be slightly anodyne, but the new look definitively ditches the split-wing grille design currently applied to every other model in Lincoln’s lineup, and it appears that the company is going to transition many of its cars’ faces to match the Conti’s—and soon. The MKZ’s midcycle refresh is as good a time as any to slap on the new mug, and you should expect to see similar facelifts of additional models in the coming years.

Platform: This being a midcycle refresh, the MKZ’s front-drive-based CD4 underpinnings (shared with the Ford Fusion) will carry over. As for the stylistic changes, we can see a large opening in the camouflage to feed air to a Continental-style rectangular grille; even though there’s a spear running down the center, we’re confident that it's merely part of the cover-up.


Other Continental-like styling cues include the headlights, which aren’t as sweeping and tapered as they are on today’s MKZ. There’s a new LED element tracing the bottom of the headlamps, and the lower fascia seems less busy. Even though this prototype’s rear end is wrapped in swirly paper, the taillights are curiously exposed—and unchanged. A closer inspection reveals new, reshaped exhaust pipes, but otherwise the tail looks the same. Lincoln may not need to change much, however; the MKZ’s full-width taillights are perhaps its most distinctive feature, and the look happens to match the treatment on the Continental.

This 2017 MKZ test mule appears to have a new wheel design, although it likely won’t be offered to customers in this cool black-painted finish, and the unseen interior will probably revert from frustrating capacitive-touch controls to actual physical buttons—because logic—and adopt a version of Ford’s Sync 3 infotainment with over-the-air updating capability.