2017 Lincoln Continental vs. 2017 Genesis G90: Comparing Our Big Luxury Cars

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2017 Lincoln Continental vs. 2017 Genesis G90: Comparing Our Big Luxury Cars

We compare our long-term 2017 Lincoln Continental and 2017 Genesis G90 head to head.

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gslippy

What a shame for Lincoln. The Continental is currently outselling the G90 3:1, but Genesis has to be pleased with their good start.

tbirdmarco

have to give boath an look to see witch one I would choose!

camsen

Looks like two losers.

roadburner

No way would I pay north of $50k for a car with FWD or FWD biased AWD...

SadButTrue

@roadburner -- I'm 10 days late, but...what about Audis? Or Bentleys? How deep does your anti-FWD bias go, in other words? Audi/Bentley pose the ultimate challenge, and I struggle with this myself. There's a natural presumption against FWD roots if you care about performance, but man, Audi's got FWD-based performance down to a science. I remember an extended drive in an S7 not that long ago. Whew. That car could do some things. Interested to hear your thoughts.

-JS

roadburner

The Quattro system is not FWD biased. Depending on the car, the F/R torque ratio is 50/50 or 40/60. The Continental does have a FWD bias in that the default ratio sends the majority of the torque to the front wheels- fine for a Focus RS or Golf R, but behind the curve of most every other car in the Continental's market segment. For my daily driver/track rat I prefer RWD, but I could probably learn to love an AWD system such as the M xDrive in the upcoming F90 M5; I'll be interested to see if the system shows up in the next generation M2.
Having said all that, I drove a 2007 Mazdaspeed 3 for 8 years and 158k miles, so I don't dislike FWD in the proper context- hot hatches, for example(although with a 1/4 mile ET of 14 seconds my MS3 was more warm than hot).

SadButTrue

roadburner said:

The Quattro system is not FWD biased. Depending on the car, the F/R torque ratio is 50/50 or 40/60. The Continental does have a FWD bias in that the default ratio sends the majority of the torque to the front wheels- fine for a Focus RS or Golf R, but behind the curve of most every other car in the Continental's market segment.

Right, I meant FWD-based AWD, as opposed to front-biased AWD. Even if the default front/rear split on an Audi is 20/80, the car will be nose-heavy because it's riding on a FWD-based platform, ergo understeer will threaten to crush your soul if you push too hard.

For example, we just tested a 2018 Audi S4 with a weight distribution of 57/43 F/R. The Quattro system may be rear-biased and have all sorts of tricks up its sleeve, but on the skidpad the car "degrades into a considerable push," to quote our track driver. "Physics wins."

That's what always comes to mind for me when I'm contemplating the Audi/Bentley performance equation. On the one hand, I salute those engineers for squeezing so much athleticism out of nose-heavy vehicles. But on the other hand, if you care about performance, you don't really want a nose-heavy vehicle, do you? Unless, as you say, it's in the "proper context," e.g. hot hatches.