Lincoln Motor Company has named Christine Cheng as its new Chief of Design. The company also announced that after decades in SoCal it will close its Irvine, CA, design studio in October. The studio lot was the site of some epic recent Lincoln and Lattes events as shown in 2024 below, where past, present and possibly future models have been displayed. Loss of the facility and its huge parking lot will mean the end of L&L as we have known it for the past several years. There is hope that L&L may resurface at a new location in the future but no firm plans to recreate the event.
More than 260 employees of the design studio have been offered transfers to the Dearborn, MI, hub of Lincoln’s U.S. design team. However, Ford Motor Company Communication’s John Clinard, a fixture in SoCal car culture and friend to LCOC, will remain in the Southland.
New Design Chief Christine Cheng joined Ford in early 2023 after two decades of design work at General Motors and Cadillac. Cheng previously helped develop the F-Series lineup, and will now take her years at Cadillac back to the luxury side of the business.
Given her Cadillac experience, hope springs eternal for fans of a potential new Lincoln luxury sedan. Despite the success of Lincoln’s current lineup of SUV models, interest in a new luxury sedan has never waned. Proof of the potential of such a model is the plethora of computer-generated Lincoln sedan images continually making the rounds on the Internet, each of which develops its own buzz and following.
In a corporate shuffling of roles, incumbent Lincoln Design Chief Kemal Curic will move to a new role – global design director for Ford Performance. At Lincoln, Curic helped evolve the a“Quiet Flight” design language. He previously helped style the exterior of the sixth-generation Ford Mustang and is an avid America muscle car fan. In his new role, Curic will be responsible for helping develop new versions of vehicles like the Mustang and Ford’s Raptor muscle truck lineup.
In the fall of 2019 Curic became Lincoln Design Director, replacing David Woodhouse, who departed for Nissan. Curic had plenty of experience with the luxury brand already, having previously served as Lincoln’s chief designer.
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