Quality was awful. Interior fit and finish was laughable. A pillar interior trim pieces regularly fell off. Steering column covers fell off. Substandard execution all the way around. To top it all off, there were major cities in the US which had no dealer representation. Tough to sell Lincolns without having Lincoln dealers. When first introduced Lincoln's pricing strategy was flawed. A new Continental Black Label was eighty/ninety grand. When Ford management came out of the ether they repositioned the car and tried to breathe life in to the corpse with a new pricing strategy. Didn't work. Marketing was invisible and the poor Continental was nailed to showroom floors. The suicide door model was supposed to provide a halo for the model but failed miserably. To sum it up; Poor quality, lack of market representation and inferior marketing/advertising doomed the iconic Continental.
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