Accommodation is this car's long suit. It has huge doors, tall windows, deep
leather-clad seats for five real people, plenty of storage space, and generous
interior illumination for night maneuvers. The trunk is among the largest in the
entire industry, wide enough and deep enough for all of your first apartment's
furniture, with a remote-control decklid latch that can be operated from the car's key
fob or an inside switch.
One of the things we enjoyed most about this new Town Car is the modern-looking,
high-function instrument panel, a panel which is fully integrated into the car from
side to side. The curved, hooded instrument panel houses a combination of analog and
digital instrumentation that's a long way from the old square-face instruments with
beveled glass covers. The function display, safety check, and trip computer all make
the car much more fun to drive on a long interstate highway journey, and everything is
very accessible and easily understood. There's a minimum of chrome on the instrument
panel, with some nice wood-look trim, and large control knobs that make you feel like
you're operating, not fiddling. The 5-range back-and-cushion heated-seat system may
be the best there is.
While Town Cars of the past have had engines up to 460 cubic inches, today's
Townie moves about with the aid of a 281 cubic inch single-overhead-cam V8 that is by any measure a world-class engine in terms of output, smoothness, quietness and fuel economy. It gets about triple the mileage of the old 460 on the highway and produces 210 horsepower, adequate for most of us, but without the accelerative snap provided by the Cadillac's 350 cubic-inch, high-torque V8. The induction system has been changed for 1996 to a center-entry system that is quite a bit quieter at wide-open throttle. The Town Car's transmission is an equally good Ford 4R70W 4-speed automatic overdrive that gives away some shift smoothness to the Japanese luxury cars, but not much.
The Town Car in its most opulent rendition, the Cartier, is the one we tested for
this report, a model that adds twin bucket-bench power 6-way heated memory seats, electrochromic mirrors, traction assist, and 16-inch spoked aluminum wheels and tires to the already huge list of Town Car standard equipment. But it drives and rides like all the others, which is to say very quietly and very smoothly, unless and until it falls into a 5-star pothole, in which case the suspension fails to protect the occupants from considerable noise and harshness. This is a luxury car, and its coil spring suspension is designed to soak up intrusions and isolate the spacious cabin from the outside world to the maximum extent possible. It is not designed to do sporting maneuvers, and offers a good deal of controlled body roll when cornering at high speed, even when equipped with the $100 ride control package option.
The new power steering effort level switch is plumbed into a speed-sensitive power
steering system, pointing the Town Car's 16-inch alloy wheels and big P225/60R-16
cruising tires. It's controlled by a horizontal slider located to the left of the
steering column, and when switched to the High position, it does make a profound
difference in the effort required to move the car off center, a much more pleasing
situation than when it is in the Normal or Low positions, when the steering goes all
ropy and unpredictable, which you don't want to do with a 4000-pound car. Until you have to park it, and that's when the Low effort range comes in very handy.
We found the standard all-disc ABS brakes on the Town Car to be authoritative and
powerful in winter driving conditions, and fade-free after a series of hard stops.