The IT Nerd

Last night my wife and I attended an event hosted by Lincoln that was intended to showcase their new 2024 Lincoln Nautilus. This is a 5 passenger mid-sized luxury crossover that is intended to play in the same space as the Lexus RX. But it has one thing that in my mind will make it stand out from the Lexus product. I’ll get to that one thing in a moment. But let’s look at the Lincoln Nautilus:

Lincoln had a black and white one on display. Personally I like the white one as it really shows off all the details of the vehicle.

The daytime running lights really stand out from most cars that I see because it really ties in the key elements of the front of the vehicle well.

Even though this is a mid sized crossover, it visually looks bigger because of the long hood. That’s going to give it a lot of presence on the road.

The theme with the lights that you saw at the front continues in the back with a single bar across the back of the vehicle. One thing that I will note is that there’s minimal branding on this vehicle. I am guessing that Lincoln wants to make the design of the vehicle speak for itself.

Now let’s move to the show stopper feature of the Lincoln Nautilus.

Meet Lincoln’s new 48″ 4K panoramic display. This display packs 1000 nits of brightness and insanely high resolution that approaches retina quality. The display is divided up into three parts:

Critical: This is the section of the display in front of the drive. You’ll see your speedometer and other critical driving related info.

Supportive: This is the centre section of the display where mapping and real time traffic info will live.

Glanceable: This is where less important info will live. For example I saw weather, Spotify and Tidal in that section.

This setup is great from a drivers perspective because when I first saw this display, my concern was that there’s so much here it would be distracting. But clearly Lincoln thought the same thing and went though the time and effort to make that less of a concern.

The infotainment system is powered by Google and Google Assistant allows you to do things like change the temperature in the car via your voice as this is intended to be a voice first system. But if Amazon Alexa or Apple’s Siri is your preference, this system supports that.

That brings me to my next point. Unlike a certain member of the big three North American carmakers who dropped support for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay in their electric vehicles, Lincoln is playing nice with everyone and giving them the choice of both, or just using the Lincoln Digital Experience by itself. And Lincoln gets bonus points for the level of integration that they offer. Have a look at this:

If you have. look at this picture, you’ll see that Apple Maps is on the centre of the 48″ display as well as the lower display. I point this out because most manufacturers do the bare minimum to put Apple CarPlay and Android Auto into their cars. Lincoln has gone the extra mile here and need to be commended for doing so as it simply creates a much better user experience.

Another thing to point out is that the Lincoln Digital Experience gets access to the Google Play Store. Which means that it will have its own app ecosystem. At launch, you’ll be able to access the following apps:

• Spotify
• Amazon Music
• Audible
• Tidal
• iHeartRadio

On top of that, if you’re not driving you’ll be able to use the following apps:

• YouTube
• Prime Video

They didn’t stop there. You can browse the web using the Vivaldi Browser app and a Bluetooth keyboard. Google Chrome is coming soon as well. So are video conferencing apps, though I couldn’t get a list of which ones. But I have to assume that the usual suspects being Zoom, Teams, and WebEx will make an appearance. Finally, this system supports games. And it was demoed to me using a Bluetooth connected Xbox controller which allowed me to play a quick game (badly I might add) of Asphalt Nitro 2 which is exclusive to Lincoln. In terms of the quality of the gameplay, my wife commented that this vehicle had a better graphics card than some gaming PCs as the quality was great. I noted a tiny amount of lag that I suspect is due to the controller being connected via Bluetooth. But I would need more time with this vehicle to confirm or deny my suspicions. But that was the only thing that I noted in terms of lag. The Lincoln Digital Experience was otherwise quick and responsive when doing pretty much anything that I tried.

The next thing that I want to touch on is privacy. You might recall last year that privacy within vehicle infotainment systems blew up in the media when it came to light via Mozilla that cars were “rolling privacy nightmares” as they collected all the data they could and sent it to car companies so that said car companies could monetize it. I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Lincoln must of taken note of this because the Lincoln Digital Experience at first glance is not a “rolling privacy nightmare”. I was shown where I could allow or deny individual permissions, such as microphone access on a per app basis, as well as stop the Lincoln Digital Experience from communicating with Lincoln at all, as well as controlling any advertising that may pop up. While this is another one of these things that I would need to dig into more to see how far this extends, I am glad to see Lincoln recognize that there are people out there who really care about their privacy, and build an infotainment system that addresses that need.

Wrapping up here, I want to touch on updates and security. This system will get regular over the air updates in the form of updates that enhance the system, updates to apps, and even the monthly Android security updates that Android users are used to. And it’s all done automatically over the air via 5G. That’s good to know because for someone like me who lives in IT and constantly preaches to people to install all available updates to stay secure, I like to see when companies make that process as easy as possible.

The Lincoln Nautilus is hitting dealerships now and starts at $64,395 CDN with your choice of a gas 2L turbo engine or a 2L turbo hybrid engine. While I haven’t driven it, the tech that the Nautilus alone makes it stand out from the competition. Thus it’s very much worth a look if you’re in the market for a five passenger luxury crossover.

This entry was posted on February 13, 2024 at 9:40 am and is filed under Products with tags Lincoln. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.