Summary

In 1959–1960, Ford developed a subcompact car codenamed “Cardinal,” intended for both the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. version was canceled in 1962, but Ford of Germany put the Cardinal into production as the 1962–1966 Ford Taunus 12M (P4). It was the first production Ford with front-wheel drive (FWD). It was followed by a refined, restyled FWD car, codenamed “Prelate,” which became the 1967–1970 Ford 12M/15M (P6).

Two decades before the American-market Escort, Tempo, and Taurus, Ford Motor Company very nearly offered a U.S.-market front-wheel-drive subcompact, codenamed Cardinal. Although Lee Iacocca killed the U.S. version at the last minute, the Cardinal went into production in West Germany as the 1962–1970 Ford Taunus 12M P4 and 12M/15M P6 (codenamed Prelate). In this installment of Ate Up With Motor, we trace the convoluted saga of the Cardinal project, the evolution of the P4 and P6, and how they fit into Ford’s changing strategy in postwar Europe.

Ford vs. the World

Whenever the Ford Cardinal project is discussed, there is a tendency to present it as an early prototype of the “world car” efforts Ford Motor Company attempted in more recent years, like the Mk1 Fiesta, the Mk3 Escort, and the Mk1 Mondeo/Contour/Mystique. However, Henry Ford I would certainly have argued that Ford had already had its most successful world car in form of the Model T, which was exported around the globe even before the First World War, accompanied from 1918 by the Model TT truck. They were not always sold in vast numbers (even the humble Tin Lizzy was still an enormously expensive purchase by many standards), but they were successful enough to make Ford cars and trucks ubiquitous even in unlikely places. Moreover, the American company’s investment in its overseas sales affiliates was generally very modest, making the export business extremely profitable.

Much to Henry’s irritation, this couldn’t — and didn’t — go on indefinitely. By the twenties, high tariffs and local vehicle taxes based on displacement (or at least cylinder bore area) had begun to limit the export potential of the Model T and Model TT. The Model A Ford, launched in 1928, didn’t fare nearly as well as the T overseas, faced with a new array of smaller British and European rivals that were less burdened by tariffs and import duties, and often much cheaper in road tax terms. In the UK, for instance, the standard 200 cu. in. (3,285 cc) four in the Model A had a daunting 24 HP taxable horsepower rating, which carried three times the annual tax of an Austin 7. Ford responded by offering a Model AF, with a de-bored 125 cu. in. (2,042 cc) engine, but even that had a fairly hefty 14.9 HP rating.

By the early thirties, a growing international trend toward protectionist import policies forced a gradual shift from importation to local assembly or local manufacture (which should be understood as a spectrum encompassing many possible gradations of local industrial involvement), initially concentrated in Ford subsidiaries in England, Germany, and France. This provided some relief from tariffs and duties, but Ford still struggled with restrictive trade policies, and local assembly involved much greater investment, and thus greater financial risk. Worse, as long as the local affiliates were still making the same products as the U.S. parent, they were effectively competing with Ford’s U.S. factories (which could achieve substantially lower unit costs through greater economies of scale), and the products still weren’t ideal for local markets.

In 1932, Ford introduced its first car designed specifically for overseas sales: the 8 HP four-cylinder Model Y, later called Ford Popular in the UK. Although initially built exclusively in the English Ford factory in Dagenham (Ford Motor Company Limited, which we’ll abbreviate Ford Ltd.) and intended specifically for European consumption, it was designed at Ford headquarters back in Dearborn, Michigan, with scant input from the English affiliate that was to make and sell it. Still, the Model Y and subsequent Model C (10 HP De Luxe) seemed a step in the right direction, being both cheaper and less expensive to run than either the Model A or the new V-8 cars, whose displacement and thirst made them specialty items outside North America.

U.S. Ford officials remained very reluctant to allow its local affiliates much control over the product, and Dearborn ceased development of the Model Y in 1934. Nonetheless, Dagenham was able to cut costs enough to steadily lower the British price of the 8 HP Ford Popular, which fell to just £100 by late 1935, more than 15 percent less than at launch.

Emboldened by this success, Ford Ltd. developed its own redesigns for the Popular and De Luxe, a liberty that so outraged Ford production chief Charlie Sorensen that he threw a fit at Ford Ltd. purchasing manager Patrick Hennessy, who had drawn the perilous assignment of taking the models of the proposed cars to Dearborn for post facto approval. Sorensen relented after examining the models more thoroughly, and he praised them to Edsel Ford the following day, leading to their approval for a fall 1937 introduction, but Dagenham was reminded in no uncertain terms that designing cars was not their job.

Despite its British success, the Model Y again ran into trade restrictions that limited its European export potential. Ford Ltd. exported the Popular, but in many markets, it cost almost as much as the far more powerful V-8 cars, which made it a poor value. It was a commercial disappointment in France (where it was subject to import duty) and in Canada (where high shipping costs raised prices to uncompetitive levels even though Canada imposed no import duties on British cars). In Germany, the Nazi government’s protectionist policies soon led Ford to develop a locally manufactured version of the Model Y for its German affiliate, Ford AG (known from July 1939 as Ford-Werke AG), beginning in 1933. This was dubbed Ford Köln (Cologne), named for the location of the Ford AG works in North Rhine-Westphalia. In 1935, the Köln was succeeded by the four-cylinder Eifel, supplemented by German-made V-8 cars. The Eifel in turn was replaced in 1939 by the somewhat larger four-cylinder Taunus.

Although the prewar German Ford models weren’t offered in the U.S. or Canada, the German affiliate did export them to certain other European markets before the war, which kicked off an uneasy competition between Ford’s British and German affiliates that would not be resolved until the seventies. It might have even worse — Dearborn also developed a version of the Taunus for the French Ford affiliate, Ford SAF, but war broke out before production could begin. (The unused tooling was written off in December 1945 and scrapped.)

This situation was far from ideal, particularly in view of the modest production volumes involved. The best prewar years for Ford Ltd., 1936 and 1937, yielded total car and truck production of 94,180 and 94,165 units respectively. Ford AG peaked in 1938 and 1939, at a mere 36,582 and 35,364 units respectively. Ford SAF, which as yet had no really unique products, peaked in 1937 at just 13,849 units.

At such levels, it made some financial sense for Ford to develop a European-specific model or set of related models (which was the plan when the Model Y was first designed), but tooling for separate production of three would have been painful even if they weren’t destined to compete against each other in export markets. Of course, this was a political problem rather than an engineering one, but the main alternative would have been for Ford to essentially concede certain markets to local rivals, something Dearborn was loath to consider. (That was Ford’s ostensible rationale for remaining in Nazi Germany, although Henry Ford was also either willfully oblivious to or tacitly supportive of the hateful trajectory and martial ambitions of the Third Reich. Even after the U.S. and Germany officially became enemies, the Nazis saw no problem in retaining existing Ford-Werke managing director Robert H. Schmidt and chairman Heinrich F. Albert, who also became wartime administrators of Ford plants in occupied France and Belgium while using forced labor in Cologne to manufacture trucks and other equipment for the Wehrmacht.)

Ford Faces the Postwar Markets

Ford’s new postwar administration faced a similar dilemma when civilian production resumed following the end of the war, although it took several years for a new postwar order to emerge.

The French affiliate was the first of the European Ford factories to offer an all-new postwar product, from autumn 1948, but Ford SAF managing director Maurice Dollfus had made the wrong bet, abandoning the Taunus-based car Dearborn had developed before the war in favor of the Ford Vedette, plucked from the wreck of an abortive U.S. Light Car program and fitted with a 2,158 cc (131.7 cu. in.) L-head V-8, the metricized V8-60 engine from the prewar Matford line. The Vedette was much too rich for postwar France, and Ford SAF annual production never again topped 24,000 units. By the early fifties, Ford’s French business was so obviously terminal that getting the Poissy operation sufficiently tidied up to prepare it for sale to Simca (concluded in November 1954) seemed a heroic feat, a kind of financial Miracle of Dunkirk.

Ford’s German affiliate in this period was a commercial threat only to itself. Although the plant in Cologne was largely undamaged during the war, throughout the late forties, Dearborn considered the situation in Germany too unstable to be worth making any substantial investments in Ford-Werke. Even as West Germany began its dramatic postwar recovery, Ford-Werke floundered. Production at Cologne passed its prewar peak after the introduction of the first postwar Taunus in 1952 and continued to grow, but Ford-Werke market share actually shrank, and Ford’s U.S. management remained reluctant to offer the kind of assistance GM was providing Opel. This left Ford-Werke in what very nearly became a death spiral: Demand for new cars was generally strong, but Cologne didn’t have the capacity to keep up, and Dearborn decreed in 1950 that any expansion would have to financed from the German affiliate’s own earnings, such as they were. It wasn’t until 1954 that U.S. officials decided Ford-Werke warranted any substantial investment, and even then only at a very modest level.

Ford Ltd. in Dagenham was in much better shape. Until the mid-fifties, the British domestic market was still tightly constrained by public policy, but Ford Ltd. had strong market share, and its production facilities were far more modern than those of Ford-Werke or most British rivals. Through the end of the 1949, Ford Ltd. had actually owned significant stakes in many other Ford international affiliates (including minority interests in Ford-Werke and Ford SAF), but in January 1950, Ford-U.S. bought out most of those shares for about £4.3 million (about $12 million), giving Dagenham an additional infusion of cash to expand its engineering facilities. While Dagenham didn’t yet have the resources to take over all aspects of engineering development, Patrick Hennessy (Sir Patrick, as he’d been knighted in 1941), now managing director, convinced Ford’s new U.S. management in Dearborn to allow the English operation more control over the design of its products.

Still, even Dagenham remained a rather stubby tail wagging a very large dog. In 1957, for instance, when Ford-U.S. and Ford Ltd. each achieved its second-highest total production output to date, the U.S. factories still outmatched Dagenham by more than seven to one. Ford-Werke production, meanwhile, was still shy of 100,000 units a year. In this light, it’s not surprising that when it came to product development, both Ford Ltd. and Ford-Werke wanted things Dearborn was not prepared to authorize.

Toward the top of that list was an all-new smaller car that could compete with European C-segment models. Hennessy had been asking for such a thing since becoming managing director in 1948; the lack of such a car had been the death knell for Ford SAF, and by the latter half of the fifties Ford-Werke was approaching a similar crisis point. Nonetheless, the answer from Dearborn had always been no. Just as a smaller car wasn’t necessarily cheaper to build than a larger model, it wasn’t any cheaper to design and develop, and Ford management was not sanguine about the likely return on investment, particularly since it would mean trying to carve out a piece of an established market segment where Ford had little presence.

The English Ford price leader in this era was the Ford Popular 103E, which was essentially a stripped-down, value-priced continuation of the prewar Anglia, and hardly competitive with modern European C-segment cars. Ford-Werke had to make do with the 1952-vintage Taunus 12M, which was still relatively modern, but cost over 50 percent more than a basic Volkswagen 1200, without the advantage of Volkswagen assembly quality.

Dream Cars, Falcons, and the Treaty of Rome

By 1956, Dearborn’s resistance was beginning to soften. It was becoming clear that free trade agreements would soon reshape European markets — the Treaty of Rome, which established the foundations of the European Economic Community (EEC), would be signed on March 25, 1957 — which meant that the rapid growth in Renault and Volkswagen sales could no longer be overlooked. In December 1956, J. Wilner Sundelson of Ford’s international division broached the idea that Ford Ltd. should develop a new pan-European light car rather than its then-forthcoming Anglia replacement.

While Dagenham was still in a much stronger position in terms of production, resources, and capital investment, the dawn of the EEC also appears to have laid to rest any serious doubts about the future of Ford-Werke. Ford’s German subsidiary had a long way to go, but West Germany was a signatory to the Treaty of Rome, while the UK was not. In August 1957, Ford began pumping significant amounts of capital into Ford-Werke, launching a major program to expand its production facilities, including preparations for a new engine plant in Cologne-Niehl.

Throughout 1957, Ford executives in the U.S., like their counterparts at GM, also became increasingly preoccupied with the growth of imported car sales, which coincided with a recessionary economy and a substantial downturn in U.S. new car sales. (Ford Division sales for the 1958 model year tumbled 41 percent from 1957.) These trends gave new momentum to the idea of a domestic “light car,” something with which Ford had been flirting on and off for over a decade.

That spring, Ford management solicited engineering proposals from Ford advanced design in Dearborn and advanced engineers in Dagenham and Cologne for a compact or subcompact “dream car” to take on European small car rivals. These were strictly paper proposals (although the Ford Design studios had already been doing some work along these lines, some of which had reached the scale model stage) for what was at this stage still a fairly tentative development project.

Short of traveling to Michigan to delve into old Ford Motor Company records, little detailed information about these “paper car” proposals is now available, and what publicly available data there is has often been often conflated with the details of later production programs. However, the British proposal was for a small front-engine, rear-wheel-drive (RWD) sedan of efficient but conventional design, while the Ford-Werke proposal was more technically ambitious, calling for front-wheel-drive (FWD), a flat-four engine, and a front suspension with a transverse front leaf spring à la Fiat. The Ford-Werke concept was reportedly similar in many respects to the then-new Goliath 1100, probably because one of the engineers who conceived it was the one-time Grand Prix racing driver August Momberger, who had previously been technical director at Goliath-Werke Borgward & Co.

We suspect that the British proposal was very similar to Dagenham’s planned all-new Anglia replacement, the Anglia 105E, which was then in development. Ford Ltd. by this time was more concerned with the British market than with Common Europe, of which the UK management had become somewhat dismissive, and Dagenham executives were not keen on the prospect of canceling or delaying such an important new British product for a European-focused “dream car.”

As for Ford-Werke, the 1957 FWD concept appears to have been more of an engineering exercise than a serious product proposal. The front-engine/FWD (FF) layout offered some advantages compared to rear-engine/RWD (RR) rivals, particularly in the area of stability at higher speeds, but what Ford-Werke more urgently needed from a product planning standpoint was something smaller and cheaper than the existing 1.2-liter Taunus 12M, which the FWD proposal was unlikely to be. The cheapest Goliath 1100 listed for DM 260 more than the 12M, it had many teething pains, and it was not a great success in the German market. (After a single year and only 14,908 units, Borgward rebranded it as the Hansa 1100, but sales of the Hansa version amounted to just 16,575 additional units through 1961.)

There were also two proposals from Dearborn, the larger of which, codenamed XK-Thunderbird, became the more immediate corporate priority, particularly once Ford learned that Chevrolet and Chrysler were also preparing American-market compacts. The XK-Thunderbird received production approval in November 1957. It was initially slated for a fall 1960 introduction as a 1961 model, but in early 1958, the timetable was accelerated to bring the new car to market for the 1960 model year. In April 1958, it was officially named Ford Falcon.

As an interim measure, Ford also arranged to import some English and German Ford models for select U.S. dealers, beginning in early 1958. This was a minor but significant shift in the order of things, really the first time Ford management had looked at the unique products developed for their overseas subsidiaries as a resource rather than just a grudging concession to local market conditions. As GM recognized with Opel and Vauxhall at about the same time, it was a way to swiftly meet an immediate need with existing products built in existing factories. There were obvious limits to this approach — neither Dagenham nor Cologne had the capacity to supply the U.S. market in large numbers, and Dearborn in those days was reluctant to make its U.S. sales organization too dependent on cars built overseas — but the financial risk was low, and the extra business was a boon for the subsidiaries. (Cars exported to the U.S. accounted for about 11.6 percent of Dagenham passenger car production for 1958 and 13.3 percent for 1959.)

There was no serious consideration of building existing English or German models in the U.S., which would not have been persuasively cheaper than introducing an all-new model. Even in those days, designing a new car and a new engine wasn’t inexpensive, but the design costs paled before the expense of production tooling, which had to be amortized over hundreds of thousands of units. Since all-new tooling and new or expanded assembly plants were necessary either way, Ford could just as well tailor the new product to better suit American tastes.

Inevitably, concessions to the latter meant the XK-Thunderbird rapidly outgrew its original conception. What had initially been conceived as a four-cylinder car roughly the same size as the new German Ford Taunus 17M soon gained 10 inches (254 mm) in overall length and 6 inches (155 mm) in overall width; the production Ford Falcon was a six-passenger sedan about the size of an English Ford Zodiac or a Mercedes-Benz 220S, with an all-new 144 cu. in. (2,365 cc) six-cylinder engine. This made the Falcon competitive in size and price with the new breed of U.S. compact cars, but it was much too big for most European buyers and redundant for Ford Ltd., which already had the similarly sized Zephyr and Zodiac. (The Falcon did go on to a long life in Australia, although the lightweight XK Falcon was not rugged enough for Australian roads, as we’ve previously recounted.)

The production approval of the Falcon therefore left Ford with most of the same problems as before: Ford still didn’t have a strong competitor for the European C-segment (the forthcoming Anglia 105E was the right size, but was it was really tailored for British tastes); there was still no replacement for the aging Taunus 12M; and if U.S. buyers interested in small cars didn’t regard the new Falcon as a viable alternative to the smaller Beetle or Renault Dauphine, Ford still had nothing else to offer them.