The news was actually worse than that. Lincoln avoided a slaughter because of the sales of its MKC, which reached 1,558. Since the model was not for sale last year, for February 2014 Ford gets to make a comparison to zero. On the plus side as well, if it can be called that, Lincoln’s beast of a sport utility vehicle (SUV), the Navigator, sold 862 units, up from 440 in the same month last year. Aside from that, Lincoln still has a model line that is disintegrating. Unimaginably, Lincoln sales could drop to as low as 5,000 a month.
The only reason Cadillac’s sales decline in February made a bigger thud than Lincoln’s is because they had further to fall, even if by only a few thousand units. The patterns the two luxury brands had were similar. Cadillac’s Herculean SUV, the Escalade, has model sales of 1,489, up 91.9%. Sales of the Escalade ESV rose 78.9% to 888. The best-selling Cadillac, the SRX, posted a unit decrease of 24.7% to 3,809.
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As an aside, for those keeping score, Mercedes sold 25,291 vehicles last month, up 5.2%. BMW sold 25,201, up 14.5%, and Audi sold 11,455, up 5.3%.
The Cadillac brand was founded in 1902 and Lincoln in 1917. It is never too late to throw in the towel. As GM discovered with Pontiac and Oldsmobile just a few years ago, not every brand has an infinite lifespan.
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