The 2015 Navigator is a bit of an automotive Coelacanth. Fresh from a recent facelift, its basic bones date back to its previous redesign in 2007, and that redesign looked like a mild evolution the one that proceeded it, which was introduced in 2003. 8 years is a lifetime in automotive evolution, where most cars would have been completely redesigned at least a couple times.
Improving on the 2007 Navigator shouldn't have been too difficult. 2007 was a time of uncertainty at Lincoln, as the brand didn't seem to know where it was going in terms of style. The 2003 Navigator was filled with outdated Lincoln cues - the vertical waterfall grille and taillights looked like your Grandfather's Town Car. In the mid-2000s, Lincoln released a series of concepts using the 1963 Continental as inspiration. The Navigator was one of the first Lincoln production cars to adopt a similar style, consisting mainly of a new glizty horizontal grille and wide rectangular taillights.
Where the 1963 Continental was understated and elegant, the same cues on the 2007 Navigator were awkward and garish. In my eyes it looks more like the tacky Lincoln luxo-barges of the 70s than it's stylish precedessors.
Which brings us to 2015. Lincoln must have realized translating the new "Continental" look into production cars that were basically warmed over Fords would be difficult. The only other Lincoln to share a similar face was the Lincoln MKX, and after which Lincoln began to phase in it's dual waterfall grille (another heritage based design that looks back to the Lincoln Zephur of the 1940s, and equally as polarizing).
Being the only holdover to the "1963" look, Lincoln designers decided to hack up the front end to add in a dual waterfall grille to match the rest of Lincoln's lineup. If you've seen the rest of Lincoln's lineup, you'll understand that making this front end treatment look good can be rather difficult. Especially when you're trying to splice it onto a boxy SUV that's basically a decade old.
Out back things look even worse, as Ford has obviously tried to keep sheetmetal changes to a minimum. The taillights are still huge, now full width but slightly narrower. The turn signal placement on the bottom of the outer pieces line up with cutlines in the tailgate, but the piece in the tailgate is painted body colour and will clash with the turn signals in any colour other than silver. I can only assume this is a stop-gap model until Ford develops a new Expedition and Navigator from the F-150's new aluminum intensive body. Let's hope the next Navigator corrects it's course.
