Yes, Lincoln makes vehicles.
They also have a website where you can look at those vehicles. That site is simply Lincoln.com. Clean. Straight-forward. Appropriate.
However, in my research, it appears that Lincoln’s web presence wasn’t always simply Lincoln.com. Take a look at this ad from July of 2000:
The ad promotes the then-new Lincoln LS, which I always thought was a handsome and nicely understated car. You rarely see these anymore and rarer still are the LS models equipped with the V8 engine.
To learn more about the LS, the ad suggests we visit www.LincolnVehicles.com:
It appears that Lincoln, the motor company, didn’t own Lincoln.com at the time of this ad. Using the Wayback Machine, the oldest use of Lincoln.com for the car company is in July of 2004.
That’s fairly consistent with most of the Lincoln ads I have clipped for this project. Ads newer than 2004 all reference Lincoln.com or a site section on Lincoln.com. However, I do have one ad from 2002 that also references Lincoln.com. We’ll have to discuss that one later.
All the captures by the Wayback Machine for Lincoln.com before July 2004 are page-not-found errors or blank pages. Though there is one capture that shows a mostly blank page for National Watch and Diamond. Huh?
Either way, it appears the car company did not own Lincoln.com in the early 2000s, which is why they used www.LincolnVehicles.com.
And here’s what you get when you go to www.LincolnVehicles.com today:
Oh. Well, that’s not great. And it’s made worse by the fact that WhoIs.com shows that the Ford Motor company still owns www.LincolnVehicles.com. Ford is usually pretty good with its web management strategy, so it’s disappointing to see this slip.
There were only two ads that I found in this whole project that referenced www.LincolnVehicles.com. This is the other one:
It’s about a year older than the one above and lists the site section of /LS to promote the Lincoln LS:
This ad also came with a little inset card that you could mail in for more information:
These little cards were fairly common, though, for whatever reason, Lincoln did not include the website on the card. (Some automakers do.)
As we saw before, www.LincolnVehicles.com is no longer a live site, so it’s not surprising that LincolnVehicles.com/LS gives us the same error page today:
Ford can do better than this.