The 1956 Lincoln was one of the brand’s most-important postwar cars. Almost 54,000 cars left the factory — an all-time record not broken until 1966. The Ford Motor Company was clearly intending to make a […]
Mercury’s Colony Park never got a huge amount of attention, but it generated steadily increasing sales throughout the second half of the 1960s. For example, in 1966 almost 19,000 of the top-of-line Mercury wagons were […]
One lingering question I have about Semon “Bunkie” Knudsen’s short tenure as Ford Motor Company president is what influence he had on the 1972 Ford Thunderbird’s design. Jim and Cheryl Farrell (2022) have written that […]
Dean’s Garage recently posted a fascinating story about the battle over the 1972 Lincoln Continental Mark IV’s styling. Jim and Cheryl Farrell (2022) describe how a design proposal championed by Ford President Semon “Bunkie” Knudsen […]
“[P]robably the guy that was most admired [by Ford Motor Company executive Lewis Crusoe] was [Robert] McNamara. He was a very concise speaker, he was a logician and prided himself that he was. He knew how […]
(EXPANDED FROM 10/2/2020) Indie Auto has previously mentioned that the 1961-63 Lincoln Continental represented a partial and short-lived deviation from Detroit groupthink. Let’s flesh out that argument with a fake 1964 Imperial. Yes, folks, lowly Chrysler could have outdone the Continental. […]
“Our mission with Ben Mills [division general manager] and Will Scott [division plant planner] was to develop a 1958 Lincoln. Then, in that era, bigger is better, longer is better, wider is better, shock the […]
(UPDATED FROM 5/1/2020) American automakers have always had a penchant for extravagant designs that can look overwrought compared to imports. Of course, this has been changing of late as foreign automakers — particularly the Japanese […]
(EXPANDED FROM 6/26/2020) Disaster in Dearborn: The Story of the Edsel is paradoxical. On the one hand, this is a serious history book — unlike so many of the coffee-table decorations that populate the big-box […]
(EXPANDED 10/24/2022) “Lower, longer, wider” was the domestic automakers’ dominant design approach until they were forced to downsize their fleet in the late-1970s due to federal fuel-economy standards. Since that time automakers have at least […]
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