How Cabot Coach Builders and Lincoln Collaborated to Create the 2020 Continental Coach Door Edition

The first thing to know about the Lincoln Continental Coach Door Edition and how it's made is that the process shares next to nothing with stretching a Lincoln MKT for bachelor party duty. This factory stretch was completely designed and engineered in-house at Lincoln with input and collaboration from Cabot Coach Builders, a firm certified by Lincoln as a Qualified Vehicle Modifier more than 30 years ago. And most of the parts used in its construction are produced by Lincoln and shipped to Haverhill, Massachusetts, where Cabot performs the "operation."

Making the Cut

Fully assembled Continental Black Label cars are shipped to Cabot, where the cut and splice are performed. The roof gets cut just about 5 inches aft of where the B-pillar structure meets the roof rails—right about where you see the 6-inch wide glass panel that extends the panoramic sunroof. The roof gets stretched, and the rocker panel and floor pan extension is roughly below this point. This approach means there's very little metal finishing and painting required.

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Stretched Sunroof

Lincoln worked with the supplier of its panoramic sunroof to have the tracks, mounts, and the sunroof shade extended by 6 inches and an additional fixed glass panel added behind the motorized one to compensate for the wheelbase stretch. It's designed, tested, and assembled to the same specifications as the standard roof.

Swapping the Hinges and Latches

Obviously the B-pillar is a vital element in the Continental's side-impact crash protection, so replacing it to convert the rear door hinge pillar to a rear door latch mounting was out of the question. Lincoln instead designed a panel that mounts over the existing pillar and provides front and rear latch mounts. Production of this part and others that convert the rear latch point to a hinge pillar, not to mention the doors themselves, are produced on contract by one of Ford's local prototyping shops on low-volume soft metal "kirksite" dies.

Doors and Floors

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The doors and door glass are produced by Lincoln and sent to Cabot. Ditto for the floor stamping inserts and the extended drive shaft. Lincoln also sends stainless exhaust-pipe extensions and additional under-floor shielding materials to tuck under the existing versions. Instead of extending the exhaust heat shield, white heat-reflective paint coats the extended floor-hump area.

Door Handles and Trim

Replicating the Coach Door concept's custom door handles that mirror one another and meet at the door gap would have been costly to produce and introduced a lot of opportunities for quality and reliability woes. Lincoln's much safer solution was to work with its door handle and trim suppliers to simply swap the left and right rear door handle and trim pieces, bringing the handles to the front of the rear doors. They had to slightly modify the trim and end caps, but this way the hardware, electric switches, and seals are all volume production pieces. Two pieces of stock daylight-opening (DLO) trim are cut and spliced with a small trim piece hiding the joint where they meet at the B-pillar.

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Interior Trim

Here's where Cabot really earns its cut of this operation, so to speak. It sews and applies the upholstery for the interior side trim panels behind the rear doors, matching the color and materials of Lincoln's Black Label door trim. It also produces the flow-through rear console that bridges from the stock front console, over the stock rear bench seat and meets the rear pass-through, which for 2020 becomes a lockable stowage bin. This unit also incorporates most of what came mounted in the fold-down armrest of the stock Continental. Wood trim for this console and champagne holder lid is fashioned to match the veneers adorning the dash and door panels.

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