This is How Lincoln Turned a Spare Tire into a Car Design FadAutoblogJames OchoaFri, September 25, 2026 at 1:01 PM UTCAdd us on GoogleAutoblog and Yahoo may earn commission from links in this article.True American LuxuryBefore the popularization and proliferation of foreign marques like Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Lexus, the American luxury car market was dominated by a trio of homegrown marques for a significant portion of the 20th century. General Motors had Cadillac, its crosstown rivals at Chrysler had the Imperial brand, and Ford had none other than Lincoln. For decades, the rivalry between Lincoln and Cadillac would be as intense as their mass-market parents and would be instrumental in mobilizing the American masses and being the Detroit auto industry's symbolic north star for technology and innovation.The original Lincoln Continental started a design trend that would become definitive of the mid-century; copied and made a symbol of classic custom machines of the era and beyond. It was called the Continental tire (no relation to the tire brand), which became a defining characteristic on the kind of American luxury cars our elders adored and cherished. Nearly every version of it, from the humpback trunk lids of the 1950s to the fake tire-shaped bulges still showing up on Lincolns into the late 1990s, traces back to a single, almost embarrassingly mundane problem: a car with a trunk too small to hold a spare tire. What started as a workaround became one of the most persistent and recognizable design cues in American automotive history, and the fact that it was never actually planned makes it a story worth telling.AdvertisementAdvertisementIt's also a useful case study in how car design trends actually materialize. There's a version of automotive history where every signature styling element gets traced back to a stylist's grand vision, a mood board, a deliberate brand strategy. However, the continental kit's real origin story is messier and more human than that: one executive's personal car, one late-stage packaging problem, and one stylist who didn't have time to start over. The rest of the American luxury industry spent the next two decades imitating a fix nobody planned says a lot about car design and the things that become fads and trends.FordView the 2 images of this gallery on the original articleA car for a VacationThe story starts in 1938, when Edsel Ford, Henry Ford's only son and Ford Motor Company's president, came back from a trip to Europe with an idea for something that no American automaker was building. Enlightened by his European vacation, e wanted his new personal car to have continental styling, a car with a low, long hood; the kind of thing he'd seen cruising around the Riviera. He brought the idea to Ford's chief stylist, Eugene T. "Bob" Gregorie, who sketched out a two-door convertible based on the Lincoln-Zephyr platform. Gregorie chopped and channeled the Zephyr's body, stretched the hood, pushed the cabin back, and gave the whole car a proportion that had more in common with prewar European coachbuilt cars than anything rolling off American assembly lines.However, a small hiccup came late in the build. With the hood stretched and the cabin moved back, there simply wasn't room left in the trunk for a spare wheel and tire. Gregorie and Edsel Ford didn't have time to redesign the bodywork before Edsel's planned March 1939 vacation to Hobe Sound, Florida, so they did the expedient thing and mounted the spare externally, upright, bolted to the back of the trunk in the old-fashioned style that most cars had abandoned once enclosed trunks became standard. It wasn't a styling flourish, it was a Tuesday-afternoon fix for a car that was due on Friday. Edsel took the car to Florida, which made quite the stir among those that saw it.FordFrom One-Off to IconThe reaction among Edsel's Florida social circle was strong enough that Ford greenlit limited production, and the Lincoln-Zephyr Continental entered showrooms as a 1940 model. The rear-mounted spare, by pure accident of timing and trunk space, became the car's signature feature and the reason for its name: continental styling, continental tire. Lincoln built the Continental through 1942, paused for the war, and picked it back up from 1946 to 1948, with the external spare intact the entire time.AdvertisementAdvertisementHowever, it is worth taking a step back to note that Lincoln weren't actually the people to invent something like this. Automakers had bolted spare wheels to the back of cars since before enclosed trunks existed, purely out of necessity, since flats were common and tires needed to be swapped on the side of the road in a reasonable manner. In a 1955 piece for Motor Life magazine, auto writer Griffith Borgeson noted that while Lincoln didn't make something fairly original, it made this type of styling feel elegant and aspirational to the point where it became permanently associated with the brand.Christopher ZiemnowiczView the 2 images of this gallery on the original articleCopycats and Custom JobsBy the early 1950s, the externally mounted spare had gone from a Lincoln quirk to the hottest accessory in the American luxury segment. Cadillac, Buick, and Packard all offered factory versions on their flagship models, and it showed up in more unexpected cars like the sporty Willys Jeepster. Its trunk got a redesigned rear valance that extended a few feet past the original bumper line, with a shelf-like structure bridging the gap to carry the tire. It's a much more integrated execution than the original improvised fix, and one that let stylists treat the whole rear end as a single continuous shape instead of a car with something bolted onto it.The aftermarket exploded right alongside the factory options. Companies like Foxcraft built entire product lines of bolt-on continental kits, distributed through catalog houses like J.C. Whitney and sold through stockists like Eastern Auto Parts and Western Auto Parts for around $120 plus tax and shipping (~$1,494.33 in 2026 money). On the higher end, firms like the Hudelson-Whitebone Corporation supplied factory-quality kits; some with louvered splash pans, some smooth, but all built to disguise the joint between the original bumper and the new tire shelf that dealers would install before a car ever left the lot.FordView the 2 images of this gallery on the original articleAdvertisementAdvertisementFord's own general manager, Lewis Crusoe, had one of these aftermarket kits installed on his personal 1955 Thunderbird well before Ford made a factory continental kit a standard fitment for 1956, according to Thunderbird club historians who've traced invoices back to that period. Legend has it Henry Ford II complained his own '55 Thunderbird's trunk couldn't fit a set of golf clubs with the spare mounted inside, which only sped up the factory's decision to move it outside for '56.Custom car culture ran with it harder than Detroit did. Builders like Barris Kustoms bolted continental kits onto chopped, sectioned, and leaded Fords, Buicks, and Oldsmobiles throughout the late 1950s, treating the exposed spare as an essential ingredient of the era's custom vocabulary alongside other touches like frenched headlights, nosed and decked trim, and deep scallop paint jobs. Some builders fabricated their kits from scratch rather than buying an off-the-shelf catalog piece, which is part of why so many surviving customs from the period had subtly different takes on the same basic idea. By the mid-1950s, it was hard to find a chrome-heavy American luxury, personal, or custom car that hadn't at least been offered with a continental kit, whether it had a real tire or not.fordView the 2 images of this gallery on the original articleWhen the Tire Stopped Being RealThe next mutation is the one that really cemented the design language into the American car's DNA: the fake continental tire. As the 1950s wore on, some automakers realized buyers wanted the look of the hump without actually mounting a spare, which would mean extra weight hanging off the back, a tire exposed to weather and road grime, a rear overhang that made parking a genuine hassle. So instead of bolting anything on, stylists started stamping the shape directly into the trunk lid itself: a purely cosmetic bulge, sculpted in sheet metal, that mimicked a tire-shaped mount without carrying an actual spare underneath it.AdvertisementAdvertisementThis detail first appeared on the 1956 Continental Mark II and Lincoln kept some version of the simulated spare-tire deck lid bulge going through further Mark-series Continentals all the way to the 1998 model year — meaning the ghost of Edsel Ford's cramped trunk was still shaping Lincoln sheet metal for decades after buyers had ever seen a real continental kit in the wild. Chrysler designer Virgil Exner picked up on the same idea for a run of Italian-bodied concept cars built with Ghia, and the cue trickled down into various production Mopars through the late 1950s. What had started as an engineering compromise on a one-off, within twenty years, became a purely decorative signal of luxury that automakers were willing to stamp into steel for no functional reason at all.Gone, but not ForgottenLike most design fads, the Continental kit eventually got old. Tastes shifted toward cleaner designs through the decades, and the look that screamed "Detroit dreamboat" in 1955 started to read as fussy and dated by the time Mercedes and BMW came into the picture.. Genuine functional kits, the kind that actually carried a spare wheel outside the body, largely disappeared from order sheets by the early 60s, though the aftermarket kept supplying them to nostalgia-minded buyers and custom builders for decades afterward. Full-size luxury cars kept flirting with faux-spare deck lid humps well into the 1980s, a design cue that by then had nothing to do with tires or trunks at all and everything to do with a car from Lincoln's family tree.Looking back, it is amazing to see how directly a problem on a bespoke convertible ended up dictating American luxury car design for decades. Nobody sat down in the design studio in 1939 and decided that a bulge on the back of a luxury car should communicate wealth and status — that meaning came after buyers and rival stylists saw Edsel's Continental and thought it looked good. Once Cadillac, Buick, and Packard all felt they had to answer with their own version, the accident had officially become an industry standard. Once Lincoln started stamping the shape into steel instead of bolting on real hardware, it became branding. Sometimes the most enduring styling cues in the business started as accidents and coincidences; things that don't happen through committee.This story was originally published by Autoblog on Sep 25, 2026, where it first appeared in the Features section. Add Autoblog as a Preferred Source by clicking here.