what if.... Robert McNamara

[maffew]

What do you think would have been Ford's lot though the 60s and up to today if Robert McNamara hadn't left Ford to become Secretary of Defense?

 

Let's leave the political/war ramifications out of this discussion though.

[Mark B. Morrow]

What do you think would have been Ford's lot though the 60s and up to today if Robert McNamara hadn't left Ford to become Secretary of Defense?

 

Let's leave the political/war ramifications out of this discussion though.

 

 

No Mustang!!! McNamara, father of the Falcon wasn't fond of Iacocca's attempt to liven the Falcon up with the V-8 and convertible models. He would not have gone in for the Mustang which is why the early planning by the "Fairlane Group" was done off the clock.

[Mustang_Marty]

If McNamara had stayed through out the 60's a couple of things would have been different. One, the Mustang & Cougar would never would have been built, along with other company's 'pony cars'. McNamara believed in making profit from selling options and accessories, and his baby was the Falcon. To entertain the 'youth market', the Falcon and Fairlane would have been upgraded and optioned to meet the demands of that market. Proof of that is the Sprint versions of both cars prior to the Mustangs release. Also both GM and Chrysler were happy with their Corvair and Valiant products against the Falcon and intially the Mustang. No reason to replace these cars had the Mustang not been built.

 

With McNamara love of frugal, utilitarian cars, the FWD V4 powered Cardinal would have been built and sold in the US, not just Europe (Ford Taunus). While this would have been about 6-8 years ahead of it's time it would have given Ford something other than the Pinto or Fiesta to give to the market in the early 70's. By the time the Escort came out in 1980, Ford was behind imports. Iacocca asked HFII if he could kill the US side of the project and he reluctanly agreed.

 

If McNamara had stayed, chances are that Ford would not have hired Bunkie Knudsen away from GM. That means that the Pontiac beaked T-Bird and LTDs and the move to lower, wider, longer cars wouldn't have happened. Bunkie was used to designing wide track Pontiacs for so long, even the small Falcon grew to mammoth proportions.

 

Cars that would have not been built

Mustang/Cougar

Pinto

Maverick

 

 

Cars that may have been built

Cardinal (US Taunus)

Smaller Pinto sized FWD

Extended Fairlane line, Torino name not introduced.

US built Cortina and Capri

70's minivan (Iacocca was hot for it. It's something McNamara would have approved of.)

Edited November 27, 2006 by Mustang_Marty

[therealmrmustang]

If McNamara had stayed through out the 60's a couple of things would have been different. One, the Mustang & Cougar would never would have been built, along with other company's 'pony cars'. McNamara believed in making profit from selling options and accessories, and his baby was the Falcon. To entertain the 'youth market', the Falcon and Fairlane would have been upgraded and optioned to meet the demands of that market. Proof of that is the Sprint versions of both cars prior to the Mustangs release. Also both GM and Chrysler were happy with their Corvair and Valiant products against the Falcon and intially the Mustang. No reason to replace these cars had the Mustang not been built.

 

With McNamara love of frugal, utilitarian cars, the FWD V4 powered Cardinal would have been built and sold in the US, not just Europe (Ford Taunus). While this would have been about 6-8 years ahead of it's time it would have given Ford something other than the Pinto or Fiesta to give to the market in the early 70's. By the time the Escort came out in 1980, Ford was behind imports.

 

If McNamara had stayed, chances are that Ford would not have hired Bunkie Knudsen away from GM. That means that the Pontiac beaked T-Bird and LTDs and the move to lower, wider, longer cars wouldn't have happened. Bunkie was used to designing wide track Pontiacs for so long, even the small Falcon grew to mammoth proportions.

 

Cars that would have not been built

Mustang/Cougar

Pinto

Maverick

Cars that may have been built

Cardinal (US Taunus)

Smaller Pinto sized FWD

Extended Fairlane line, Torino name not introduced.

US built Cortina and Capri

70's minivan (Iacocca was hot for it. It's something McNamara would have approved of.)

 

 

Let's not forget the Total Performance era...

 

Ford would not have been as involved or not involved at all in racing through the Sixties if McNamara had stayed. Not to mention Ford's involvement in the development of the Indy Lotus Ford, Cobra, GT-40, etc.

 

Total Performance would not have existed, the Indy Lotus and the Cobra would have been powered by something else and Ford would've had no reason to go to Le Mans, or to develop the Indy V8, the FE 427, the SOHC 427, the Cosworth Ford V8, the Boss 302, the Boss 429, etc. etc. etc.

 

Ford might have gone the way of AMC by the early Eighties...

[LincolnFan]

All I know about him is that he had something to do with the '61 Continental.

 

^5 McNamara.

[Mark B. Morrow]

All I know about him is that he had something to do with the '61 Continental.

 

^5 McNamara.

 

 

McNamara was the driving force behind the '61 Continental which was originally conceived as the Thunderbird. McMNamara saw the T-Bird mock up and suggested stretching the platform to a 4-door. The '61 T-Bird and Continental were both built at Wixom and shared many mechanical and trim pieces.

[Edstock]

How about the Bronco?

[Mustang_Marty]

Let's not forget the Total Performance era...

 

Ford would not have been as involved or not involved at all in racing through the Sixties if McNamara had stayed. Not to mention Ford's involvement in the development of the Indy Lotus Ford, Cobra, GT-40, etc.

 

Total Performance would not have existed, the Indy Lotus and the Cobra would have been powered by something else and Ford would've had no reason to go to Le Mans, or to develop the Indy V8, the FE 427, the SOHC 427, the Cosworth Ford V8, the Boss 302, the Boss 429, etc. etc. etc.

 

Ford might have gone the way of AMC by the early Eighties...

 

 

I agree... Ford would have been late to game, only bringing and knife to the gunfight. The 390 and 406 would have been the top engines and only available in the Galaxie, T-Bird, and maybe the Fairlane (as a GTO competitor) Shelby went to Chevy first and couldn't get a suitable deal, so he may have gone to Chrysler for their 273 after Ford & McNamara turned him down.

 

One thing though, I beleive that Ford would have been better prepared for the 70's oil crisis and economic downturn had they had the smaller cars the McNamara envisioned. Instead Ford, along with the other 3 US companies had to throw something together to compete.

 

Ford had much better stylists than Nash-Rambler in the 60s so my guess is it would have survived as its own entity unlike AMC.

 

 

Ford like the other American car companies enjoyed the profits made off their big cars and just couldn't come to the realization that buying trends were changing. 30 years later it sounds familiar. The difference was they were profitable before the crisis hit in the 70's. This time around they are not.

[mackinaw]

With McNamara love of frugal, utilitarian cars, the FWD V4 powered Cardinal would have been built and sold in the US, not just Europe (Ford Taunus).

 

I often wondered what would have happened if the Cardinal had been produced. This was a distinctly non-conventional car that just may have endeared itself to the baby-boomer generation and become their vehicle of choice, much like what happened to the VW Beetle. Successive generations of the Cardinal, if still FWD, would have been ideally postioned to capitalize on the first "energy crisis" of th 1970's.

 

Well never know.

[grbeck]

Interesting topic...

 

McNamara is a bundle of contradictions. He was the ultimate beancounter, and his main legacy is the supremacy of the Finance Department within the corporation, which is crippling it today. That, in my view, is his worst sin.

 

He did lead the push to make cars safer in the mid-1950s, when other car makers - and the customers - really wanted to talk about flashy styling, racing and ever-escalating horsepower. He does deserve credit for pushing Ford's 1956 "Lifeguard" safety features, which were a small, but good, start, in making cars safer.

 

He also tried to improve quality. The 1957 regular Fords and Mercurys were quality disasters, while the 1958 unit-body Lincoln was even worse, so he pushed to improve quality control within the corporation, which did bring Ford's quality up to snuff by the early 1960s. Unfortunately, he never really understood how the plants worked, so I wonder just how far his quality efforts would have gone if he had stayed at Ford.

 

For example, in the early 1950s, Ford needed to invest heavily in new paint facilities to keep up with expanded production and the increasing size of the vehicles. McNamara balked, because he didn't want to invest that level of money in the plants, even though the production people knew it was necessary to maintain quality with the increased level of production. At one point in the debate, he actually proposed building the frames in half, painting them, and then welding the two parts together, to avoid investing in new paint facilities!

 

He wanted to kill Lincoln after the disastrous 1958 models, and turned to Elwood Engel's Thunderbird proposal to set Lincoln on a new direction. Unfortunately, Lincoln was given only enough money for two bodystyles - a four-door sedan and four-door convertible. His platform-sharing plan between the 1961 Thunderbird and Continental, however, is the type of program that Ford needs today - two distinct vehicles that are built in the same plant, using many of the same components, but appealing to different markets and enhancing the reputation of their respective marques. Perhaps the leaders who greenlighted the Edge/MKX and Fusion/MKZ programs should have studied this...

 

The new direction for Lincoln ultimately worked, although the first few years of sales weren't what Ford expected. Lincoln sales increased slowly, but Cadillac's sales also kept rising. Lincoln didn't cut into Cadillac's lead until Lee Iacocca's 1968 Continental Mark III debuted. It was the first Lincoln to outsell a comparable Cadillac (the reborn, front-wheel-drive Eldorado). Whether McNamara would have stuck with the suicide-door Lincolns until they really caught on, and were bolstered by the Continental Mark III, remains to be seen.

 

While he struck gold many times - the Falcon, the Fairlane, the four-seat Thunderbird - he didn't like performance, and, if I recall correctly, was a strong supporter of the 1957 Automobile Manufacturers Association (AMA) ban on manufacturers' direct sponsorship of racing and racing teams. By the early 1960s, this was a handicap, as Pontiac and Chevrolet were less reluctant to push performance and find ways around the ban. Both Chevrolet and Pontiac gained reputations as "hot" cars at Ford's expense after 1958.

 

The Falcon whipped the Corvair in first-year sales, but the early Corvairs were saved by the sporty Monza, and the even sportier Spyders, which gave the line an air of sophistication compared to the much more pedestrian Falcons (remember that Ralph Nader's book didn't hit the fan until 1965). The Monza ultimately inspired the Mustang, but whether McNamara would have greenlighted it remains to be seen, as others have noted. Iacocca could sell ice to Eskimos, so he may have been able to sell the Mustang to McNamara.

 

The Fairlane successfully capitalized on the intermediate market uncovered by the standard Ramblers, but by 1964 the hot Pontiac GTO and Olds 442 overshadowed it (Thunderbolts nonwithstanding - they were on the race track, while the hot Pontiac and Olds were on the street). Ford's total market share in the early 1960s was unsteady until the Mustang and the "Total Performance" campaign gave the company new direction.

 

The Cardinal would have been about a decade ahead of its time, and given Ford a big lead in the subcompact segment. Whether it would have been reliable is another matter, as front-wheel-drive was still a new idea for small cars in the early 1960s. Today's perception nonwithstanding, small foreign cars of that time, except for the VW Beetle, were inferior in reliability compared to the Falcon/Valiant/Chevy II, despite (or more likely, because of) their more advanced engineering. Buyers of Austins and Fiats had different expectations of reliability than buyers of Fords. The Cardinal could have ended up giving Ford a black eye.

 

The main problem I see with McNamara if he had stuck around is that he would have ultimately been pushed out of the company for three reasons:

 

1. He was as ambitious as Lee Iacocca, though he hid it better, and Henry was firm in reminding his executives whose name was on the building;

 

2. He pushed ideas - safety, economy, and small cars for their own sake - that were ahead of their time, but really ran counter to the prevailing ethos among not only Detroit, but also the majority of car buyers at that time; and

 

3. He was too much of a beancounter, and, to borrow a phrase, knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Sometimes a car company has to sponsor a low-volume model to burnish the image of the rest of the line (early Corvettes, semi-custom Cadillac Eldorados in the 1950s and early 1960s, Hemi-powered Dodges and Plymouths in the 1960s). He thought that if a vehicle didn't sell in large numbers and make lots of money, it wasn't worth building. He favored plain vanilla and simplified model offerings, as long as they sold in large numbers and made lots of money. Here again, he may have been ahead of his time, as he wanted Ford to be what Toyota has ultimately become. Given that, in the 1960s, GM was still firing all eight cylinders, and Chrysler made a strong comeback after 1962, and the root of their appeal was performance, style, and, in GM's case, good quality, Ford may have had a hard time competing. Remember that Toyota didn't really make inroads in the American market until Detroit began selling junk...

Edited December 5, 2006 by grbeck

[Mark B. Morrow]

Grbeck, that was an excellent post and an informed synopsis of the McNamara years. The McNamara era at Ford was referred to as the "No Fun" years in Randy Leffingwell's Mustang book. The need for financial control was an imperative when Hank the Deuce brought the "Whiz Kids' in to the company in '46. Ford had been rudderless in the early '40s with Edsel trying to exert his vision and being fought by Henry and Harry Bennett at every turn. The company was nearly bankrupt and probably would have failed had it not been for the production needs of WWII.

 

It would be an interesting to discuss : What If Henry died in '38 and Edsel had taken over and lived another 20 years?

 

Ford took a lot of criticism for the '56 safety ads. It was long said that Ford sold safety and Chevy sold cars. The '57s did have their quality issues but they did out sell Chevy. The decesion to move to the four seat T-Bird was an unqualified success. The '58 outsold the 55-57 combined. The '61 Continental saved Lincoln and Ford's quality improved greatly in the early '60s. Lincoln offerred a 24 month warranty at a time when most of the industry had 1 year or less.

 

The Cardinal was probably too far ahead of its time. It would have been a tiny car compared to the Falcon. Gas was cheap and Americans were used to having room. There wasn't much of a market for small sedans even the imported English Fords and Opels were not big sellers. The Capri was relatively successful in the early '70s despite a lackluster sales campaign.

 

As you correctly pointed out Henry II was very much in control and he hated small cars. "Mini Cars, Mini Profits" was the mantra of the day. Henry was the one who nixed the minivan which Hal Sperlich invented at Ford. Sperlich went to Chrysler, Iacocca greenlighted the minivan project and the rest is history.

 

McNamara's years at Ford were a mixed bag at best. He was necessary to save the company in the '50s and probably left at just the right time. Iacocca was far better to lead Ford into the '60s.

Edited December 4, 2006 by Mark B. Morrow

[grbeck]

Grbeck, that was an excellent post and an informed synopsis of the McNamara years. The McNamara era at Ford was referred to as the "No Fun" years in Randy Leffingwell's Mustang book. The need for financial control was an imperative when Hank the Deuce brought the "Whiz Kids' in to the company in '46. Ford had been rudderless in the early '40s with Edsel trying to exert his vision and being fought by Henry and Harry Bennett at every turn. The company was nearly bankrupt and probably would have failed had it not been for the production needs of WWII.

 

It would be an interesting to discuss : What If Henry died in '38 and Edsel had taken over and lived another 20 years?

 

Ford took a lot of criticism for the '56 safety ads. It was long said that Ford sold safety and Chevy sold cars. The '57s did have their quality issues but they did out sell Chevy. The decesion to move to the four seat T-Bird was an unqualified success. The '58 outsold the 55-57 combined. The '61 Continental saved Lincoln and Ford's quality improved greatly in the early '60s. Lincoln offerred a 24 month warranty at a time when most of the industry had 1 year or less.

 

The Cardinal was probably too far ahead of its time. It would have been a tiny car compared to the Falcon. Gas was cheap and Americans were used to having room. There wasn't much of a market for small sedans even the imported English Fords and Opels were not big sellers. The Capri was relatively successful in the early '70s despite a lackluster sales campaign.

 

As you correctly pointed out Henry II was very much in control and he hated small cars. "Mini Cars, Mini Profits" was the mantra of the day. Henry was the one who nixed the minivan which Hal Sperlich invented at Ford. Sperlich went to Chrysler, Iacocca greenlighted the minivan project and the rest is history.

 

McNamara's years at Ford were a mixed bag at best. He was necessary to save the company in the '50s and probably left at just the right time. Iacocca was far better to lead Ford into the '60s.

 

Finance people have their place...but they should not necessarily be running the company.

 

If he had stuck around through the early 1960s, the company probably would have foundered for several years. Chrysler, which made a big comeback after 1962, may gained even more market share - mostly stolen from a weaker Ford.