Look what Matt W found for us listed on eBay this time! It is being sold with no reserve. Bidding at this time is over $16,000. This thing is almost 19 feet long and weighs close to 3 tons and it’s not even a fire truck! This was Ford’s third try at the Continental. Unlike the previous generation when Continental was a hand-built automobile and a stand-alone brand, these were built right along with the other Lincolns. Instead of competing with Rolls Royce, these were designed to compete with Cadillac and Imperial. This is one of the collection of “cars in a box” written about recently like the 4 door 196o Continental and the Corvair Rampside pickup. It was the grandfather’s daily driver until he had it restored in the 1980s. It was then stored in a warehouse and started occasionally. When the owner died in 2010 his son had no interest in them so he put his cars in trailers. The grandson has sold them all so far except this convertible. It has had mechanical restoration including rebuilding the master cylinder as well as the carburetor. It runs and drives well.
This interior is so red it hurts my eyes. It was redone with the restoration in the 1980s and looks to be in amazing condition. This must have had extensive detailing.
Here’s the 315 horsepower 430 V8 engine. It looks complete and original and even has the original glass windshield bottle. It has had the necessary mechanical restoration performed and runs well.
This styling was original and unique. Some folks referred to these Continentals as “Slant-eyed monsters”.
This beauty is not perfect and is certainly not for everyone. That’s a huge trunk but hopefully, you’ll have someone else to lift your luggage over that tall grill. The seller has been realistic in selling his collection, offering the cars with a reasonable starting price and no reserve. It will be interesting to see what the final price is. This would be a great parade car and great for drives like top-down summer cruising.
Trunk was large enough to use as overnight camper.
As to Bright Red interior. Wear your shades and men in those times wore hat, not baseball caps, but hats.
An old fart, Panama hat, shades white bucks , plaid pants, and a good cigar, younger floosy with bleach blonde hair, with bright red lipstick gum smacking, and long legs, and off to the club top down at 36 mph.
That’s a classy ride.
That’s a whole lotta car
I have to say this is really a work of art. This says 1950’s excess like nothing else. And in beautiful condition. You could never restore one at even double the price this is at now (about $17,000 with a day to go). Does anybody know what the tubes are for by the back window? Just part of the body lines or did they have a purpose?
They cover the the bows of the top when it is down.
When the top is retracted the arms on each side do not lay down below the top of the body line. The front portion of the arms are then covered with these covers. We always called them the bullets.
Here is a different angle of the “tubes”.
Any young’uns out there who’ve never seen one in person can’t appreciate just how big these cars are. If you plan to Simoniz one of these, better pack a lunch.
What a nice land yacht. If there was room in the garage, and the budget….
beautiful condition. are these unit body or full frame?
They are unibody. One huge unibody
Gary, Ford attempted a unibody on these Lincolns but it really didn’t work too well. The earlier Lincolns (57 or 58) had a notorious problem with the slide rule type speedo glass cracking at the 50MPH mark due to the 19 foot body flexing of these cars. Special bracing was installed on later cars to prevent this but it kicked the weight way up. Ford dropped this setup after the 1960 model year.
I believe, 58-60 Lincolns ( and Edsel’s and Mercury’s) were the 1st unibody cars for Ford.
Edsels and Mercurys were not unibody.
Here is a customized version of the same model on display that I saw yesterday a Sacramento Autorama which runs through Sunday.
Another view
Greetings All,
Love this, don’t see enough pre-60 Lincolns.
Never knew they took the rear window styling motif and applied it to the convertible?
Sweeeeeeeet!
That custom one shown above was built by Dave Kindig and crew in Salt Lake City, has a full custom built frame and a supercharged Falconer aluminum V-12 in it. A really nice custom!
Don’t ya just love what the Kindigit crew did with the rear wheel openings.
Nice car! It’s really nice to see one without the continental kit!
I read somewhere that these were the largest uni-body cars ever made. I owned a 1959 briefly. The doors, if you count the thickness of their huge armrests, are more than a foot thick. The door step plate is huge. Your legs have to be nearly six feet long to stretch from the driver’s seat cushion out over the huge, wide door step, and down to the ground, when exiting the car. Customers complained so much about the single-digit gasoline mileage that the later models (1960, I think) came with two-barrel carburetors instead of four-barrels, in an effort to get the cars to approach 10 miles per gallon–notice I didn’t say “Get 10 miles per gallon” but “approach…”!
In the 1970s, there used to be an original-owner ’60 Continental convertible in the Burbank/Glendale area that had a Continental Kit installed from new – talk about llllloooooonnnnnngggg! The things was so damned big that it didn’t fit into the length of the single car garage it was parked in.
A buddy of mine tried for years to buy it, but never scored the car. I’ve always wondered what its fate was?
Go ahead and tell the truth. They were called the “Chinese Continentals” when they came out. I always dearly loved them and never thought the term was disrespectful to the people or the car.
Sold for $25,500.00.
That car is worth a lot more than that.
I think we will keep the one we have here.
Not going to give it away.
It looks as if it has been rear-ended. Terrible styling, in my opinion.