How Lincoln Continental got the blues

DETROIT -- You wouldn’t think it, but creating an all-blue interior for a car that looks perfect is maddeningly difficult, designers and engineers say.

But blue was Lincoln’s signature color in the brand’s glory days of the 1950s and ‘60s. Engineers shuddered when designers suggested reviving it for the brand’s new flagship: the 2017 Continental.

“Blue is a color on a knife edge,” said Continental chief engineer Michael Celentino says. “It has elements of green and red that are incredibly difficult to match on all the materials in an interior, especially when you consider the differing grain and gloss of materials ranging from the seats to the dashboard to the headliner.”

He added, “If you’re not careful, blue will ‘flop’ and look like those other colors when the light hits it from some angles.”

Despite that, the response to the blue-on-blue interior in the Continental concept car at auto shows was so strong that the design team created what it called Rhapsody, a blue that is available as one of the options for the Continental’s high-end Black Label packages.

Blue cars have a special place in Lincoln history, design director David Woodhouse says. “Blue was Lincoln’s iconic color. The Ford family always had dark blue Continentals. MGM had a special blue created to match Liz Taylor’s eyes and gave her a car that color.

In the 1950s, Frank Sinatra’s Continental II cost more than a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud.

The deep blue – richer than royal, lighter than navy – signals Lincoln's attempt to return to the days when Lincoln’s distinctive design and attention to detail made it on be of the world’s top luxury brands.

But making the blue interior for the Continental wasn't easy.

“It’s the most difficult color we’ve ever done,” Woodhouse says. Suppliers had to perfectly match the color and gloss of leather, suede, padded vinyl, plastic and other materials. The usual procedure is simply to give each supplier a swatch and specifications for the color. Getting a perfect match with Rhapsody’s deep blue on so many materials demanded more.

Ford ended up creating a specific mix of hues with its colorant supplier. With other colors, that supplier would tell parts makers what hue to mix to get the right result, but Rhapsody is so demanding that Ford has it ship the completed mix to each supplier to get an identical shade on seats, plastic, carpet, dash, console, doors and headliner.

The color’s name is a tribute to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”