2015 Lincoln Navigator leads with its chin

Once upon a time, people in Detroit risked their jobs to denigrate the Lincoln Navigator. So powerful and surprising was its draw in the late ‘90s that Cadillac officials lied about their sales figures to avoid having the Navigator drive Lincoln to supremacy of Detroit luxury sales.

Today, you can go many an hour in major cities without spotting a new Navigator on the roads, and the very idea of a luxury SUV big enough to tow a boat seems out of sync with the age. Yet just as Cadillac has revamped the Escalade, so too Lincoln has made the Navigator new-ish for 2015 — albeit with a redesign that you can’t help but see.

At its peak in 1998, Lincoln sold nearly 44,000 Navigators a year, making more profit per vehicle than any other vehicle Ford bolted together. Since the economic collapse, Lincoln has moved just over 8,000 a year — despite a resurgence in luxury seven-seat SUVs driven by slightly smaller competitors from the Mercedes-Benz GL-Class to the Audi Q7. (In theory the Lincoln MKT is supposed to compete there. In practice, it’s just too weird; in an up market last year, sales fell 15 percent.)