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).

Hatching the Cardinal

German Ford officials received the news of the Cardinal project rather gloomily. John Andrews had high hopes for Gutzeit’s NPX-C5, which had been presented to the Ford-Werke management board in December 1959 and had been designated Projekt-4 (P4), the next all-new German Ford model after the then-forthcoming 17M P3. With styling development underway in Cologne’s small Formgestaltung department, Andrews had taken the P4 proposal to Dearborn to request production approval, only to learn that U.S. management insisted that Cologne accept the larger FWD Cardinal instead.

There were several factors at play. Dearborn still questioned whether Ford-Werke could actually produce an all-new model on its own — the Taunus 17M P3, which was the first postwar German Ford really designed in Cologne (see the first sidebar on the previous page), hadn’t yet entered production — and whether an all-new German-designed RWD C-segment car would sell enough to justify the tooling investment remained uncertain. (Although the facelifted 12M was now selling surprisingly well given the age of the basic design, the primary reason it had lingered so long was that its sales had been too weak to justify the tooling expense of an all-new model.)

The bigger issue was that McNamara had already concluded that joint U.S.-German production was essential to the financial viability of both projects. Without the cost savings of sourcing the powertrains from Cologne, Ford couldn’t hope to sell the U.S. Cardinal for a competitive price, and without the additional volume that U.S. sales would provide, it remained much harder to justify the necessary capital investments for Ford of Germany. At that time, what Ford-Werke really needed to establish a real competitive position in West Germany, much less Common Europe, was not simply a new C-segment model, but also a major expansion of its production facilities. Starting in the fall of 1957, Ford-U.S. management had authorized some significant upgrades in Cologne, and there had been tentative plans for a new engine plant since 1958, but Andrews and Layton had just spent three frustrating years chasing possible merger deals, which still seemed like a more feasible path to increasing Ford-Werke production capacity than convincing Dearborn to authorize new plant construction with so many uncertainties about when (or if) European sales might repay the investment. If Cologne were also supplying the U.S. market, however, the numbers became much more compelling, potentially doubling production volume and thus making it easier to keep new factories operating in the black.

Unfortunately for Ford-Werke, for this plan to work as Dearborn wanted, the American and German cars needed to be substantially the same. This in turn meant that Cologne would have to accept the larger Cardinal “package,” which was bigger than the existing 12M and much bigger than the German NPX-C5/P4 design, and which had front-wheel drive, of which senior Ford-Werke technical staff wanted no part. The RWD P4 would have been simpler and cheaper — although engineers in Dearborn still insisted it would be heavier than the U.S.-designed FWD car, something about which Ford-Werke chassis design chief Bernhard Osswald remained justifiably skeptical — but while the German design might have been more suitable for European markets, Ford management thought the NPX-C5/P4 much too small for American consumption. Given the anticipated sales volumes, the U.S. version was deemed the higher priority, so if the Cardinal was larger than the Germans preferred, that was just too bad.

If the reaction to this in Cologne was glum bordering on despondent, response in Dagenham was positively defiant. Once the Cardinal project was moving toward production, Ford management in the U.S. also revisited the idea of making it a joint British-German program. Sir Patrick Hennessy, by this time the chairman of Ford Ltd., promptly informed his Light Cars executive engineer Fred Hart and product planning chief Terence Beckett that he had no intention of accepting the Cardinal, and charged them with developing a superior all-British alternative that could be ready on the same timetable. Beckett and product planning manager Hamish Orr-Ewing waggishly suggested the codename Archbishop.

Beckett’s conception for the Archbishop program immediately identified the central conundrum of the FWD Cardinal: that what still seemed a rather dinky little car by American standards was in fact a medium-size one in a British or European context. Fortunately for Hennessy and company, Ford Ltd. already had a brand-new model for the British small car market; the Anglia 105E had debuted less than six months earlier, to strong critical and commercial response. Initially, the Archbishop concept built on existing studies for an Anglia successor, but it soon evolved into a new mid-price model, positioned between the Anglia and the larger English Ford models. With such limited lead time, it wouldn’t be technologically daring, but rather a light, efficient, conventionally engineered model that would offer buyers more car for less money, with the potential of much higher profits.

Ford-Werke didn’t have that luxury, nor could it match Ford Ltd. engineering resources, which made writing off the development work and tooling that had already been done for the NPX-C5/P4 and its OHC engine a very bitter blow. Through much of the year, Andrews continued trying to persuade Dearborn to allow Ford-Werke to go ahead with the smaller RWD P4, but it was to no avail.

Dearborn eventually agreed to compensate Ford-Werke for some of its development costs, but in the short term, the only consolation U.S. management was prepared to offer Cologne was adopting the design Wes Dahlberg’s German studio had developed for the RWD P4. Cologne’s earliest design conceptions had been somewhat awkward-looking, but the later iterations that took shape over the spring and summer of 1960 had been an improvement on the ungainly 1959 American styling prototypes. Ford-Werke subsequently flew modeler Fred Hoadley back to Dearborn for about six weeks to adapt the German design to the American package.

Unfortunately, scaling up the German design and reshaping the front end to accommodate the Cardinal power pack was also accompanied by significant revisions. Designer John Najjar told Karl Ludvigsen that the object was to limit the number of individual body panels in order to minimize tooling costs, which also resulted in a non-coincidental resemblance to the contemporary Rambler American, whose 1961 restyling had had a similar cost-conscious design brief. To modern eyes, the resulting design might qualify as cute, but there was something slightly odd about the sedan’s proportions, like a man wearing an off-the-rack suit a size too large, and the interior, whose design was supervised by Art Miller, was pleasant but very basic. There were also compromises in body engineering aimed at further reducing assembly costs and increasing compatibility with U.S. manufacturing equipment. Fred Hoadley lamented, “By the time you modified the design to fit the American package, it was just another animal.”

The U.S. version of the FWD car was known internally as Cardinal A, while the German version was to be Cardinal B, differing mainly in engine displacement and trim details. Powertrains for both versions were to be produced at the new engine plant in Cologne-Niehl, whose construction began in September 1960. This plant, which was completed the following October, was slated to make 1,200 V-4 engines a day, three-fourths of them earmarked for the U.S. The Cardinal A was to be assembled at the Ford plant in Louisville, Kentucky, which had previously been an Edsel plant, with an expected volume of about 150,000 units a year. To make it competitive with the Beetle on price, the target U.S. retail price was set at $1,650, necessitating a bare-bones level of standard equipment and trim.

With the narrow-angle engine shelved in favor of the 60-degree V-4, Dearborn decided there would be two initial versions of the new engine. The U.S. Cardinal A engine was to be 1.5 liters (90 cu. in.), while the Cardinal B would have a 1,183 cc (72.2 cu. in.) version, produced on the same assembly line. For cost reasons, the proposed aluminum block was abandoned, and the V-4 engine’s exhaust manifolds were made integral with the cylinder heads. Cardinal B engines would also make do with 6-volt electrical systems, although the U.S. engine was to have a 12-volt system from the start. The Cardinal B did get a standard four-speed gearbox, borrowing many components from the new fully synchronized transmission that was optional on the 17M P3, with constant-mesh gears and a reverse lockout; U.S. cars were to have a three-speed with an unsynchronized low gear. All Cardinals were to have column-mounted shifters.

Inevitably, some other aspects of the I-PF-4 package were also changed or abandoned during production development of the Cardinal. The torsion bar front suspension and rack-and-sector steering were deemed too risky, and there weren’t enough suppliers able to make the planned single-leaf rear springs. In their place, the Cardinal front suspension adopted a Goliath- or Fiat-style transverse leaf spring that did double duty as upper wishbones, while the rear suspension was revised to use multi-leaf springs, along with an anti-roll bar fitted ahead of the axle.

Initially, the front leaf spring was clamped atop the gearbox housing, in keeping with the “ponypak” concept, but road testing revealed that this caused unacceptable bucking, and allowed so much powertrain movement that it threatened to break the exhaust system. The Ford Division advanced light vehicles department was able to mitigate this by clamping the spring to a body crossmember rather than the powertrain, but this was still only a partial fix.

Steering, meanwhile, became a conventional recirculating ball setup, with the steering gear fixed to the body rather than the powertrain; power steering wasn’t contemplated. After examining the operating angles of the driveshafts, engineers in Dearborn also decided that Rzeppa-type constant velocity (CV) joints were necessary only on the wheel end of each driveshaft, with cheaper Cardan (Hooke) universal joints sufficing for the inboard (differential) ends.

There were many teething pains during development, and not a little friction between engineers in Cologne and Dearborn. Ford Division engineer Bertil T. Andren, the Cardinal project leader, flew to Germany to evaluate some persistent problems with the cooling system and complained in his eventual report that the Ford-Werke engineers were uncooperative. The Cardinal B may have had a Ford-Werke project number — it assumed the P4 code previously intended for the German RWD design — but so far as the German staff was concerned, it was strictly NIH: not invented here.

Iacocca Objects

In November 1960, Robert McNamara was appointed president of the Ford Motor Company. At the same time, 36-year-old Lee Iacocca, an engineer and salesman who had previously been head of marketing for Ford Division, succeeded Jim Wright as the division’s general manager. McNamara, who would soon depart to become secretary of defense, had been the Cardinal project’s most powerful supporter; Iacocca would be its most formidable nemesis.

Some months into his new role, Iacocca traveled to Cologne to see how the Cardinal project was progressing there. In his 1984 memoir, Iacocca claims this was his first glimpse of the prototype Cardinal, which left him “underwhelmed” with its size and styling. He allowed that it “was a fine car for the European market” (a sentiment that few Ford-Werke personnel would have endorsed at that point!), but for the U.S., he said he thought it was “a loser,” and came away determined to kill it.

Iacocca’s account leaves some troublesome unanswered questions. His memoir implies that his trip to Cologne was his first glimpse of the Cardinal, which makes little sense. Although the version of the car he would have seen in early 1961 had probably undergone a few minor design and engineering refinements, there was by then a whole assortment of scale models, full-size styling prototypes, and test mules in Dearborn, which Iacocca could certainly have seen (and even driven) without flying to Germany. Indeed, it would have been very peculiar if he hadn’t already done so, since this was an important new U.S. Ford model that was then only about 18 months from production. Hanns-Peter Rosellen’s account of the Ford-Werke perspective in his 1988 book Ford-Schritte is no help in this regard, mistakenly stating that Iacocca’s visit was in February 1960, a year earlier than Iacocca himself indicates, and some nine months before Iacocca became head of Ford Division. (In February 1960, Iacocca was still car marketing manager for Ford Division, and by his own account had not yet been to Germany.)

However, if the details of Iacocca’s visit to Cologne are slightly suspect, his antipathy is not in doubt. Iacocca disliked the Cardinal both for what it was (small, cheap, dowdy) and for what it represented; his memoir repeatedly characterizes it as “McNamara’s car,” by which he meant the embodiment of a cold-blooded, numbers-driven technocratic frugality to which Iacocca held himself superior. (The implied rivalry strikes us as rather one-sided — McNamara may not have had much feel for sporty or luxurious cars personally, but he was certainly not adverse to them if he thought they’d make money — but even two decades later, Iacocca’s determination to prove he was savvier and smarter than his former boss had obviously not abated.)

In February 1961, Iacocca dropped hints to the automotive press about the division’s subcompact and intermediate projects, remarking, “We’re going to have smaller ones and bigger ones.” However, that summer, the Cardinal project got a new product planner, Jack Eckhold, who, after two successive in-depth audits, concluded that (in Karl Ludvigsen’s words), “the U.S. Cardinal’s true total cost to the Ford Motor Co., not just to the Ford Div. alone,” was actually greater than the Falcon’s, meaning that there was no way it could be profitably sold for a lower price. Ludvigsen’s account, published seven years before Iacocca’s memoir, implies that it was this unexpected revelation that drove Iacocca’s disdain for the project, but it seems far more likely that it was the other way around. Iacocca had learned enough from McNamara to understand that arguments couched in financial terms were often the most persuasive. Iacocca’s strategy for souring Henry Ford II on the Cardinal was to compare it to the Edsel and warn that it wouldn’t appeal to the youth market, while in other company, Iacocca insisted loudly that the market for subcompacts in the U.S. was “pretty small and pretty thin” and would eventually be erased by the Falcon and Fairlane. However, to convince people like controller Arjay Miller to write off the substantial investment Ford had already made, Iacocca needed some unfavorable numbers on costs and return on investment. That the relatively junior Eckhold fortuitously came up with a report full of data supporting his boss’s contention that the U.S. Cardinal would be a hopeless money-pit therefore seems like something other than mere coincidence.

Nonetheless, cost was becoming a definite problem for the Cardinal A program. According to a later Ford document provided to us by the Ford Archives (not dated, but apparently prepared during the run-up to the launch of the 1981 Escort in 1979–1980), when the Cardinal had received U.S. production authorization in 1960, the estimated wholesale price (dealer invoice, not suggested retail) was $1,306, $272 less than a basic Falcon two-door sedan. By December 1961, the Cardinal’s expected U.S. wholesale price had climbed to $1,414, $108 over the original target. One contributing factor may have been the revaluation of the Deutschmark in March 1961, which brought the exchange rate of the DM to the U.S. dollar from 4.2 to 4.0 to 1. This meant it would now be more expensive for Ford to import engines and drivetrains from Cologne, even with no other changes. The cost increases shrank the expected margin between the Cardinal and the Falcon to $170, and there was no longer any hope of matching or undercutting Volkswagen or Renault on list price.

In spring 1962, just four months before the scheduled start of production, Iacocca finally got his way. Henry Ford II announced in an April 11 press release that “as a result of market conditions and other factors,” Ford had decided the Cardinal — which had just been tentatively announced in a Ford prospectus issued on March 23 — would not be produced “in the United States this year.”

With this, the Cardinal A was effectively dead, although HFII noted that its demise “in no way affects plans our European companies, Ford of Britain and Ford of Germany, may have under consideration.” Since Ford Ltd. was well along with its Archbishop project, which emerged later that year as the Ford Consul Cortina, this meant Cologne would have to go it alone with the P4/Cardinal B. The irony was pronounced: Ford-Werke had had the Cardinal foisted upon them because it seemed to better suit U.S. requirements than the car Ford-Werke wanted to build, only to be stuck with the rather plump and somewhat undercooked bird after Dearborn decided it was no longer suitable. (After the U.S. program was canceled, HFII did belatedly offer John Andrews the opportunity to back out and cancel the program entirely, but Andrews declined, since to do so at such a late stage would have thrown a wrench into Cologne’s production plans, as well as further delaying replacement of the elderly RWD 12M.)

At a shareholders meeting on May 24, HFII declined to comment on how much Ford had lost with the cancellation. Iacocca later said that Ford had by that time invested about $35 million in the Cardinal program, although he didn’t specify how he arrived at that total. In the October 1962 Car and Driver, Joseph Rebholz cited “industry sources” estimating Ford’s losses at about $10 million, which probably didn’t include the settlements Ford paid to suppliers whose orders had been summarily canceled.

Ford Division also reluctantly agreed to pay Ford-Werke DM 62 million ($15.5 million) compensation for the termination of the agreement to provide powertrains for the U.S. Cardinal and for the tooling costs of the RWD NPX-C5 project Ford-Werke had been obliged to cancel. This was a tax write-off for the company, but it came out of Ford Division’s budget, something that earned Ford-Werke finance executive Hans Adolf Barthelmeh (who had flown to Dearborn to negotiate the deal) Iacocca’s lasting enmity.

That Iacocca saw this as a victory strikes us as a triumph of ego over common sense, particularly because the result was so uncompromising. Ford could, for instance, have offered the German-built Cardinal as a captive import (just as they had continued to do with English Ford cars) to evaluate actual American consumer interest before making a final decision on U.S. production. Indeed, some industry observers expected Dearborn to do just that, which would also have been a worthwhile concession for Ford-Werke, whose big new engine plant had been tooled with the expectation that it would supply V-4 engines for the U.S. as well as Cologne. However, the bottom line was that Iacocca just didn’t like the Cardinal any more than he liked the Falcon, and he didn’t want his tenure at Ford Division associated with it, even if that meant throwing away millions of dollars and further hobbling the company’s none-too-robust German affiliate.

It probably helped Iacocca’s case that the U.S. market share of import cars, which had caused such alarm just a few years earlier, had fallen off significantly since the introduction of the Falcon and other domestic compacts. This would prove to be a temporary reprieve, but by the time that became evident, the relevance of the Cardinal had passed. For a number of years afterward, Ford held onto the body dies that had been purchased for the Louisville plant while contemplating repurposing the tooling for Ford Brasil, but nothing came of that, and we assume the surviving tooling was eventually scrapped.