“Fred Hooven was a very good friend of mine and had a much bigger job at Ford than I did. He worked for Mike Ference. Henry Ford asked Ference — this was in 1960. He asked him to project 20 years ahead what was going to happen so that they could plan their facilities and so forth. Well, Mike was a scientist, but he had very little background in automobiles, so he asked Fred Hooven to do this thing for him. The study would go to Henry Ford under Mike’s signature, but Fred would do it. Fred is an old friend of mine, and he wanted — he respected my opinion, so he — this may have been prior to 1960.
Anyway, it was projecting 20 years in the future, and Fred brought it out to me and asked me to read it over the weekend and come in Monday morning and criticize it before he turned it in to Mike Ference. So, I did this, and when I turned it in on Monday morning, I said, you know, it was a very thorough study. I said, ‘I think there’s one you’ve missed,’ and he said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘You haven’t said anything about the Japanese.’ He said, ‘Well, they’re not building automobiles.’ I said, ‘No they’re not building automobiles, but they’re building motorcycles, they’re building cameras, and there’s no reason why they can’t build automobiles.’ Well, he hadn’t thought of that, and I don’t know whether that went into the report or not, but it was a pretty good forecast.
I remember another thing that happened. This was when I was working at the Ford Division on Plymouth Road, I think it was. Bob McNamara was head of the Ford Division at that time, and I was trying to get the company to get interested in a small car, and I finally got them to — they did buy a Volkswagen, and they boarded it. They took it apart and boarded it. So, Will Scott was the head of product planning, and Will asked me to make some sketches of future cars — layouts of various kinds. I made several with front-wheel drive — small cars, and Chalmers Goyert was my boss, and he told one day, he said, ‘What’s all this business about front-wheel drive? Why are you doing that?’ I said, ‘Well, it makes the best package for a small car.’ He said, ‘Well, forget it — Ford Motor will never build a front-wheel-drive automobile.’
Anyway, I was trying to get them interested in a small car. There was a man there that was — I don’t recall his name, but he was pretty high in the company, and he was their crystal-ball expert. He was forecasting the future, and I went and talked to him, and I said, ‘Can’t you give me some support on this small car program?’ He said, ‘Well, Gordon, that’s only one-half of one percent of the market. It will never go above two percent of the total market,’ so he said, ‘You might as well forget it. American’s don’t like small cars.’ So, the problem was they didn’t pay me enough money to listen to me.”
— Gordon Buehrig (Crippen, 1984)
RE:SOURCES
- Crippen, David R.; 1984. “The Reminiscences of Gordon Buehrig.” Automobile in American Life and Society. Interviewed in July.
PHOTOGRAPHY:
- Banner image is a 1965 Ford Taunus P4 taken by Berthold Werner via Wikipedia Creative Commons 2.0. Photo has been lightly edited to reduce background shadows.
Also see ‘Was Ford right to kill the front-wheel-drive 1963 Cardinal/Redwing?’
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