“. . . Henry was himself growing a little dizzy with everything happening around him. And the more disoriented he became, the angrier he got. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ford sat through countless meetings in which young engineers and product planners, most of them acolytes of Lee Iacocca, wanted the company to build small front-wheel-drive passenger cars. There was always another meeting where Ford had to listen to proposals that went against his fundamental product beliefs — that small cars meant small profits. Ford wanted to continue building large rear-wheel-drive sedans that offered high profit margins. His finance staff beat back the challenges, but the younger firebrand executives such as Sperlich and Krandall were coming up with new studies and new data that suggested that the Ford Motor Company was straying off course by not building a small front-wheel-drive car. And this drove Henry crazy.”
— Richard A. Johnson, Six Men Who Built the Modern Auto Industry (2005)
RE:SOURCES
- Johnson, Richard A.; 2005. Six Men Who Built the Modern Auto Industry. Motorbooks, St. Paul, MN: p. 89.
Also see ‘Lee Iacocca got lucky with the 1964-66 Ford Mustang’
I’ve read Sperlich wanted the Fox platform to be FWD, but HF II and Iacocca decided to stick with RWD. Ford history in the late 70’s and 80’s would have been far different. Fairmont sales collapsed when GM’s FWD X body debuted. I guess a FWD Fox platform would have resulted in products similar to Chrysler’s K cars, but there would have been no Mustang 5.0.
Two Ford biographers, Robert Lacey and Douglas Brinkley have written that Hank the Deuce was very enamored of his European cars and likely had an open mind as long as the cars were very profitable. Iacocca probably saw that converting the Fox platform to front-wheel-drive would not easily translate to ease of production. Lacey documents this battle between the Ford product planners over the choices for the new Fox platform. Iacocca chose the easy way out, in my opinion. At Chrysler, to get the government-backed loans, a clean-sheet design was already in the works and the OmniRizon was on its way to production.