1948 Lincoln Convertible 292 CID 1948 images

The Lincoln Continental exists because Edsel Ford wanted a better-looking car than anything Detroit was building in 1938 — so he had one made just for himself. A decade later, the 1948 convertible represents the final year of that original design, powered by a 292-cubic-inch V12 Lincoln would soon retire for good. Only 452 convertibles like this one were ever built. Here’s the story behind one of Detroit’s rarest postwar V12s.

1948 Lincoln Convertible 292 CID V12 3-Spd Manual

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Edsel Ford didn’t set out to create an American design icon — he just wanted a good-looking car for himself. After a trip to Europe in 1938 left him unimpressed with anything Detroit was building, he asked designer Bob Gregorie for a one-off custom convertible based on a Lincoln Zephyr, purely for his own use. The result impressed everyone who saw it enough that Ford put it into production as the Continental. By 1948, that idea had reached its final form before a full redesign, powered by a V12 engine Lincoln would retire for good not long after. Only a few hundred convertibles like this one ever reached buyers.

A Personal Car That Became a Production Icon

The Lincoln Continental exists because Edsel Ford wanted something better than what Detroit was offering. His 1938 request for a one-off European-inspired convertible, based on a heavily modified Zephyr, turned out so well that Ford put a production version into showrooms as the 1940 Continental. The 1948 model represents the final year of that original Mark I design before Lincoln moved on to an all-new postwar body. Designer Bob Gregorie leaned heavily on long, low proportions and a spare-tire-mounted rear deck, a silhouette so distinctive that the word “Continental” would end up attached to Lincoln’s flagship nameplate for decades afterward.

The Last of Lincoln’s V12s

Under the hood sits a 292-cubic-inch flathead V12 fed by a single dual-downdraft carburetor, producing 125 horsepower at 3,600 rpm and backed by a column-shifted three-speed manual, with an overdrive unit or three-speed automatic available. It’s a drivetrain layout Lincoln wouldn’t repeat much longer — the flathead V12 era at the company was winding down, making the 1948 Continental one of the last American production cars built around a twelve-cylinder engine for decades to come. The V12, while smooth and quiet by the standards of the day, produced modest output compared with the V8 engines beginning to dominate the American market, one of several reasons the company eventually abandoned the layout entirely.

How Rare Is Rare?

Lincoln built 43,950 cars for the 1948 model year, but only 1,300 of those were Mark I Continentals, and just 452 of those were convertibles like this one. Riding on a 125-inch wheelbase and tipping the scales at roughly 4,320 pounds, it’s a genuinely rare survivor from the last chapter of one of Detroit’s most influential personal-luxury designs. Survivors from this final model year are now prized as much for their design pedigree as their rarity, representing the last iteration of a car built for one man’s personal use before it became an industry benchmark.

A Design Museums Took Seriously

The Lincoln Continental’s design earned recognition beyond the car world when New York’s Museum of Modern Art included it among a handful of vehicles in its landmark 1951 “8 Automobiles” exhibition, one of the first times an American production car had been treated as a legitimate design object rather than simply industrial machinery. That kind of institutional recognition was rare for any car, let alone one built in relatively modest numbers, and it reflects just how far Bob Gregorie’s original 1939 sketch had traveled from a one-off personal favor for Edsel Ford.

Gregorie’s Broader Legacy at Ford

Bob Gregorie went on to shape much of Ford’s postwar design language beyond the Continental, eventually becoming the company’s chief stylist before Ford’s design operations were reorganized in the early 1950s. His willingness to let a personal project for Edsel Ford turn into one of the most influential American designs of the era set a template other in-house stylists at Ford and elsewhere would follow for decades, proving that a low-volume specialty car could shift an entire brand’s design identity far more than its production numbers alone would suggest.

The Continental Nameplate’s Long Hiatus

The original Continental disappeared after 1948 and didn’t return until the completely different, ultra-luxury 1956 Continental Mark II, a car built by a standalone Continental Division rather than badged simply as a Lincoln. That six-year gap means the 1948 convertible pictured here represents the true end of an era rather than a mid-cycle model — the last chance to buy the original, Edsel Ford-inspired vision of what a Continental was supposed to be before the nameplate was relaunched with an entirely different design philosophy.

Shared Roots With Ford’s Flathead V8

The 292-cubic-inch V12 under this car’s hood grew out of the same flathead engineering family as Ford’s own flathead V8, sharing basic architecture and manufacturing tooling philosophy even though the two engines served completely different market segments. That shared heritage is part of why Lincoln could develop and produce a V12 economically even in relatively low volumes, leveraging Ford’s existing flathead expertise rather than engineering an entirely unrelated engine family from scratch.

Why Convertibles Command a Premium

Open-top Mark I Continentals have always carried a significant premium over coupes in the collector market, both because convertibles were built in far smaller numbers to begin with and because a folding top adds mechanical complexity and cost that many surviving examples never received the restoration budget to properly address. A convertible in good driving order, like the one shown in this gallery, represents a meaningfully rarer and more complex survivor than the already-scarce coupe version of the same car.

A Design Language That Outlived the Car Itself

Long after production ended, the original Continental’s long hood, low beltline, and rear-mounted spare tire silhouette became shorthand for an entire era of American luxury car design, influencing everything from later Lincoln models to the broader postwar personal-luxury segment that eventually produced cars like the Ford Thunderbird and Buick Riviera. Few single models from the late 1940s cast as long a design shadow as the original Continental, a legacy built almost entirely on a car Edsel Ford originally commissioned just for himself.

A Car Built Before Consumer Research Ran the Show

Edsel Ford commissioned the original Continental prototype without market surveys or focus groups, relying entirely on his own taste and Bob Gregorie’s design instincts rather than the kind of consumer research that would come to dominate American car development in later decades. That personal, almost old-fashioned approach to greenlighting a production car is part of what makes the Continental’s origin story stand out, since few other influential postwar designs can trace their existence to one executive’s individual eye for style.

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