Former Ford Motor Company executive Donald Frey explained to David Crippen (1986) why he thought that the automaker’s “cockamamie” decision-making structure led to major quality-control problems with the 1957 Ford. “As it turned out, preceding […]
“. . . We (started facelifting) the ’51, which was a terrible looking spinner job. It had a transparent, plastic spinner inside, and, God, they were terrible looking cars. . . . I remember how that […]
(UPDATED FROM 10/4/2014) Collectible Automobile’s interviews can be a valuable means of documenting automotive history, but they can also lead us astray due to inaccuracies. For one thing, the memories of key participants can fade […]
“[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 […]
“I didn’t like his aloof egotism. He’d sit in a meeting and open his briefcase and brush his hair, and he’d dress floozy, you know, and he called us the establishment. He was a queer […]
Dean’s Garage has posted an autobiographical essay by Stan Mott (2022) in the wake of his recent death at the age of 89. His story illustrates how the creative spirit that draws designers to the […]
“What distressed most of us was that we could never be identified as just designers. We were always the ‘la femmes,’ or we were the female designers, and that — we were designers, and men […]
“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 […]
“He liked the cleanliness of the idea. He liked the aerodynamics of the idea, and in his mind they were genuinely aerodynamic. Later on, Chrysler proved that in wind tunnel tests. They ran cross-wind tests […]
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