2006 Lincoln Mark LT

For pretty much all my life, I've heard heavily-optioned pickup trucks referred to as "Cowboy Cadillacs". When I worked at a Chevy dealership back in the late Eighties, when the GMT400 trucks were still shiny and new, the most expensive vehicles on the lot weren't Corvettes but rather Silverados where someone had gone a little crazy with the options list.

Shortly after American manufacturers stuck a toe in the luxury SUV market at the close of the previous millennium with the Cadillac Escalade and Lincoln Navigator, the temptation to actually take a stab at a luxury pickup truck became overwhelming. The profit margin could be enormous, since the basic platform was amortized by the sale of a bajillion plain white wrapper work trucks to the contractors, tradesmen, and farmhands of the land.

Sure enough, 2002 saw Cadillac bring the Escalade EXT, basically a gold-plated Chevy Avalanche, to market and Lincoln launched the Blackwood, a gussied-up F-150 Supercrew. The Blackwood only sold 3,300ish copies and was discontinued after only the one model year, but Lincoln decided to take another run at the concept in 2006 with the Mark LT. (Presumably this stood for Luxury Truck, Lincoln not yet having succumbed to the fascination with alphanumeric model designators from which they suffered through the 2010s.)

Available in either 4WD, like the basic Black one in the photo, or 2WD configurations, the only powertrain offered was the 5.4L Triton V-8 backed by a four-speed automatic. The 5.4L Triton was the SOHC 3-valve-per-cylinder variant, making 300 horsepower and 365 lb-ft of torque. That motor was a little overwhelmed by nearly three tons of truck, requiring 8.8 seconds to haul 5,900 pounds of Mark LT to sixty, according to Car and Driver's test of a 2007 model. The quarter mile took 16.7 seconds at 83 mph, and the governor shut off the fun at 101.

Price as tested was $48,995, which comes to about $75,400 in today's dough.

While sales started off encouraging, they went off a cliff after the 2007 model year with the onset of the Great Recession and Lincoln axed its second attempt at a truck after selling less than 200 of the 2009 models. They haven't tried again since.

The one in the photo was snapped in August of 2021 using a Nikon D200 and a 35-105mm f/3.5-4.5D zoom lens.