Unlike the Mustang, whose design process is well documented, it's hard to find a lot of specific information about the development of Ford's bigger cars in the mid-1960s. Even the men who designed these cars had little to say about them. The cars were ordinary, everyday products, and they never inspired the same fascination as their more glamorous or innovative brethren.

Despite that lack of data, we will go out on a limb and speculate that the Ford LTD was the inspiration of Lee Iacocca, who became general manager of the Ford division in 1960. Unlike his predecessor, the efficiency-minded Robert S. McNamara, Iacocca was a believer in what pundits of the day called "selling the sizzle." He understood very well that even shoppers on a budget could be lured by the promise of a little opulence.

Ford's LTD was introduced in 1965 as a luxury-oriented sub-series of the full-size Galaxie line. (Until 1967, it was technically a Ford Galaxie 500 LTD.) It was offered in two body styles, a two-door hardtop coupe or a four-door hardtop sedan with a severe-looking, squared-off formal roof. For a hefty $548 premium over an ordinary Galaxie 500, a surcharge of more than 20%, the LTD transformed the mundane Galaxie into a kind of cut-price Cadillac.


This is a 1966 LTD hardtop coupe. '66 full-size Fords were slightly less angular looking than the '65s, although the body shell was the same. Stacked quad headlights, angled slightly forward, were reminiscent of contemporary Pontiacs.

To make sense of the LTD, we must first consider the way American cars were marketed in this period. By 1965 each automaker offered its bread-and-butter products in several basic sizes: compact, intermediate, and "standard." Each of those was divided into several distinct series, and those into a number of different models, most of which were available in two or more body styles. Chevrolet's full-size car, for example, was offered as the Biscayne, Bel Air, Impala, and Impala SS, most of which could be had as a two- or four-door sedan or a two- or four-door hardtop. Each of the model series was advertised and marketed as distinct entity. The mechanical differences between the series were usually minimal; the main distinction was in ambiance.

Besides the LTD, Ford's full-size lineup in 1965 consisted of the Custom, Custom 500, Galaxie 500, and Galaxie 500/XL, plus the Country Sedan and Country Squire wagons. The Custom, the cheapest big Ford, was pure taxicab in its upholstery, carpeting, and trim; dour and functional. The Galaxie 500/XL was a glittering, chrome-encrusted, color-coordinated, all-vinyl palace, like some kind of halfway house for Vegas high rollers. The LTD went for a different flavor of posh, more British men's club than flashy casino. Upholstery was a silky-soft nylon tricot (which Ford's own designers privately dubbed "panty cloth"), with highly ornate door trims. You got deluxe carpeting, a folding armrest for rear-seat passengers, a set of interior courtesy lights, a clock, and a bit more sound insulation. Four-door models had Ford's new flow-through ventilation system, which had debuted the previous year on the Thunderbird, for better ventilation with the windows raised. You also received a set of prominent exterior badges to inform the neighbors that yours was not merely a Galaxie, but an L T D. (LTD, Ford carefully noted, did not mean anything, although "Luxury Trim Decor" has been suggested. It most emphatically did not mean Limited, which was a Buick trademark, and thus a potential source of lawsuits.)

Of course, insuring that your LTD was properly outfitted in a manner becoming its luxury image would cost you a fair bit more than the $3,300-ish base price. While most big Fords came standard with a six, the LTD (and the 500/XL) came standard with a V8 engine and the three-speed Cruise-O-Matic transmission, a combination that cost around $300 extra on lesser models. If you wanted to add a bigger engine, air conditioning, power windows, radio, and a few other toys, you could expect to add an extra $1,000 or more onto the sticker. A fully loaded LTD carried a price tag more befitting a Buick.


Two-door hardtops had a more slanted roofline than the four-door, which had a more formal-looking, upright backlight. This body style was also available as the sportier 7-Litre, which came standard with the big 428 cu. in. (7.0 L) V8, but buyers preferred the LTD by a significant margin. With big engines now available in mid-size cars, performance-minded shoppers were no longer interested in sporty big cars.

Given how little of substance really distinguished the LTD from a regular full-size Ford, you would be forgiven for assuming that buyers would be hesitant to lay out Buick-sized money for a tarted-up Galaxie. But Iacocca understood his market; unlike McNamara, he had been in sales, and had a good grasp of what customers valued. He knew that while there was nothing on the LTD's spec sheet to excite an enthusiast, it had showroom appeal. True, from a strict dollar-value standpoint, the LTD was a questionable proposition, but Iacocca knew that the average Ford buyer thought in terms of monthly payments, not cash cost. The LTD's obvious plushness made an easy case for the salesman trying to talk a hesitant Galaxie buyer into stepping up to the more expensive model.

Dubious dollar value notwithstanding, the LTD's luxury-car impression was not wholly unconvincing, thanks to the revamp all big Fords received for 1965. Iacocca proudly proclaimed that Ford had spent $425 million on the full-size line, a lot of money in those days (by comparison, the ill-fated Edsel project had cost only $250 million). Except for the powertrain, the big Fords were all new. Like GM, Ford abandoned its self-supporting chassis for a new perimeter frame with torque boxes, allowing the frame to flex to absorb shocks and harshness from the suspension. The body itself was made very rigid, and isolated from the chassis with thick rubber mounts. Ford had previously used Hotchkiss drive for its big cars, with a live axle carried on parallel leaf springs, but the '65s adopted coil springs in back, with three trailing links and a Panhard rod to locate the axle, much like contemporary Buicks. In the front suspension, rather than the traditional wide lower wishbone, Ford used a lateral control arm, located by a trailing link with a flexible rubber bushing. This link, which Ford called a "drag strut," allowed the front suspension arms to move backwards, rather than just vertically, in response to bumps. (Ford had introduced this feature on the 1961 Lincoln Continental, and it was also adopted by GM big cars in the mid-sixties.)

The net effect of all this was a cloud-like ride, so isolated from road harshness that you could amble over "Botts' dots" (the raised markers used to mark lane boundaries) without feeling them. Of course, the consequence was sloppy handling, not to mention a kind of nautical lope over undulating pavement that soon had passengers reaching for the Dramamine; Ford thoughtfully sprayed the "panty cloth" upholstery with Scotchguard to protect against mishap. At least seasick passengers could lose their lunches in silence. Thanks to a heavy dose of sound insulation, Ford famously claimed that the LTD was quieter than a Rolls-Royce.


The 390 cu. in. (6.4 L) V8 was optional on the LTD. It was rated at either 265 or 315 gross horsepower (198 or 235 kW), depending on whether it had a two-barrel or four-barrel carburetor. Either rating was generous -- the 390 was never as strong as similarly sized engines from Ford's competitors.

The LTD's powertrain options were basically the same as those of any other big Ford. With the standard 289 (4.7L) V8, the LTD needed around 13 seconds to amble to 60 mph, topping out at a little over 100 mph. If you had a really pronounced disdain for your passengers' digestion, and were on a first-name basis with your Ford dealer, you could theoretically specify the big 427 cu. in. (7.0 L) "side-oiler" and a four-speed manual transmission in your new LTD, although doing so precluded you from ordering power steering, power brakes, or air conditioning. Many buyers opted for the more mundane big-block engines, the 250-horsepower (186-kW) 352 (5.7 L) or 300-hp (224 kW) 390 (6.4 L), both quiet, torquey, and unexciting powerplants. With the 390 and Cruise-O-Matic, reaching 60 mph (97 kph) took about 9.5 seconds, with top speed in the neighborhood of 110 mph (175 kph). Fuel economy with that combination ranged from 12-15 mpg (15.7 to 16.9 L/100 km), although with leaded premium still hovering at around 30 cents a gallon, few buyers cared. Sadly, none of Ford's $425 million had been spent on brakes, so slowing down was not an LTD strong point.

Despite the lousy brakes and premium price, the LTD was exceedingly popular, moving more than 105,000 units in its first year. Since most of the model's price premium was pure gravy, it fattened Ford's profit margins in a most agreeable way. Naturally, GM and Chrysler quickly trotted out their own pseudo-luxury models, the Chevy Caprice and Plymouth VIP, and even American Motors got into the act the following year with its DPL.

Like a lot of popular successes, the critics weren't sure what to make of the LTD and its imitators. Car and Driver had a hard time justifying the price tag, complaining that the Caprice and LTD were no better trimmed or built than their lesser brothers. The buying public clearly had no such reservations, and bought both in large numbers. Stretched LTD limousines also became popular as executive transportation in developing countries.

The confounding thing about the LTD is that Ford Motor Company had Mercury, an entire separate division theoretically intended for people who wanted something a little bit more expensive and luxurious than a standard Ford. Indeed, in price and concept, the LTD cut a rather bloody swath through Mercury territory, just as Chevy's Caprice encroached heavily on the turf of Pontiac and Oldsmobile. Since internecine warfare is seldom good for business, one might wonder why the corporations would allow that kind of overlap; the answer was simply that the divisions were not managed by the same people. Lee Iacocca was responsible for the Ford division, not Lincoln-Mercury -- if boosting his margins meant cutting Mercury's throat, well, c'est la guerre. The same kind of thinking ran rampant in GM's divisions, to their eventual cost.

The LTD returned for 1966, with some very mild styling tweaks and a new powertrain option, Thunderbird's 345-horsepower (257 kW) 428 cu. in. (7.0 L) engine. Buyers with an uncouth insistence on stopping quickly could now buy front disc brakes for an extra $97.21, a bargain. Sales remained strong.


Squared-off tail lamps replaced Ford's customary round "dog-dish" lights in 1965. Trunk space is generous, but interior room is unimpressive when you consider this car's dimensions (a wheelbase of 119 inches (3,023 mm), 210 inches (5,334 mm) long, 79 inches (2,007 mm) wide) and two-ton (1,800 kg) heft.

In 1967, the LTD became a series of its own, no longer a subset of the Galaxie line. The popularity of that series kept growing well into the seventies, as did the car itself. It peaked at 223.9 inches (5,687 mm) in the mid-seventies, tipping the scales at two and a half tons (2,270 kg) and offering engines up to 460 cubic inches (7.6 L). Smog controls meant that even the big engine made only a meager 197 net horsepower (147 kW), so no LTD was fast, but that was never the point. In 1977 Ford also applied the much-loved nameplate to its midsize models, creating the short-lived intermediate LTD II. The full-size LTD soldiered on concurrently, with Ford advertising proclaiming it "the full-size car that kept its size," a potshot at GM's downsized big cars. (Ford also extolled the big LTD's "road-hugging weight," which quickly became one of history's most-mocked marketing taglines.)

The trusty LTD nameplate survived until 1991, becoming the LTD Crown Victoria after 1986. By then its original luxury connotations had become rather diluted, but it still had its partisans.

If the LTD doesn't exactly make sense to modern eyes -- five hundred bucks for better upholstery and armrests? -- we certainly can't say that Iacocca was wrong about the tastes of the market. Even the most mundane econobox can be ordered with features that were once reserved for high-end luxury cars. Today, you can order leather upholstery on a Corolla, so perhaps we shouldn't point too many fingers at the LTD and its "panty cloth"...

# # #

Our sources for this article included Tim Howley, "Hot and Heavy: 1964 Ford Galaxie 500XL," Special Interest Autos #49, February 1979, pp. 12-17, 64-65, reprinted in in Terry Ehrich, ed., The Hemmings Motor News Book of Postwar Fords (Hemmings Motor News Collector-Car Books) (Bennington, VT: Hemmings Motor News, 2000); "Car Life Road Test: 1965 Ford Galaxy LTD," Car Life, December 1964; "Ford Galaxie 7-Litre: A 6-quart Package of Performance With a 10-gallon Measure of Stopping Power," Car Life, January 1966; "7-Litre vs. Caprice 427," Car and Driver, January 1966; Steve Kelly, "Ford Road Test: Henry's T is Now LTD: Unlimited Luxury with Quiet to Match," Motor Trend, April 1966; "Powercars: Ford Named It 'LTD,'" Car Life, June 1969; and Patrick Bedard, "Ford LTD: All is Well with the American Dream," Car and Driver, February 1976, all of which are reprinted in R.M. Clarke, ed., Ford Galaxie & LTD 1960-1976 - Gold Portfolio (Cobham, Surrey: Brooklands Books Ltd., 2003); and "Ford LTD: Here is the most silent, most luxurious -- and possibly the best -- Ford ever built," Car and Driver, February 1965 (Vol. 10, No. 8), pp. 30-32, 82-83.

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