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.

The I-PF-4 Project

It was here that a more ambitious idea began to take shape. Although Ford-International had already broached the possibility of developing a four-cylinder “European Common Car” that could be ready for production by 1962, there was no assurance that this would sell in sufficient numbers to be worth the cost, especially if Ford Ltd. was only willing to consider it as a supplement to rather than a replacement for the Anglia 105E. Similarly, many Dearborn executives saw no way to build a U.S.-market subcompact that would could actually turn a profit. However, if those projects could somehow be combined, in collaborative production as well as design, it might be possible to surmount some otherwise difficult financial barriers and create a Beetle-fighter that would be viable both in Europe and in the U.S. “Segment I” subcompact market.

This kind of commonality was much to the liking of Robert S. McNamara, Ford group vice president for cars and trucks, who was a strong believer in stamping out anything he saw as wasteful duplication of effort. A few years later, as U.S. secretary of defense, McNamara mounted a campaign to eliminate redundancy in military programs, perhaps the most infamous result of which was the Tactical Fighter, Experimental (TFX) program, which sought to consolidate several sets of superficially similar Air Force and Navy requirements into a single technologically ambitious aircraft. That program, which became the variable-geometry (swing-wing) General Dynamics F-111, proved costly and endlessly controversial. The intended Navy version was canceled after a handful of prototypes, a planned British version never got off the ground, and it took many years to sort out the USAF variants’ numerous design and developmental shortcomings. (You can consider this foreshadowing in more ways that one.)

In 1958–1959, however, all that was still in the future, and the idea of a European-American co-production seemed to have considerable financial logic. Cost studies suggested that Ford could build the engines for both U.S. and European cars in Germany for less than it would cost to set up a U.S. production line for a new four-cylinder engine — enough less, McNamara determined, to make the small car profitable in the U.S. even at a price significantly below that of the Falcon, which would otherwise be difficult if not impossible.

Since this still-hypothetical car was to be sold in the U.S., its development was assigned to the product study vehicles department in Dearborn, where department manager Fred Bloom began preliminary work in February 1959. Early on, his team gravitated toward the FWD package outlined in the 1957 Ford-Werke “dream car” proposal, as the engineering team (among them several Germans, including Klaus Arning, Helmut Graetzel, and Frank Theyleg, along with former Ford Ltd. engineer Roy Lunn) felt a FF layout could be decisively superior to existing European RR cars in stability, noise levels, and heating. This package was designated I-PF-4, meaning Segment I (subcompact), power pack forward, four cylinders.

Much like the German proposal that inspired it, the I-PF-4 would have a traditional longitudinal engine FWD layout. Neither Roy Lunn nor Frank Theyleg, who was responsible for transmission and differential design, was interested in using transfer gears or a transfer chain to route power to the front wheels, which would have meant additional cost, friction, and noise. With a subcompact car, this meant the engine had to be as short as possible to avoid excessive front-end length. The German “dream car” proposal had specified a flat-four, like the Goliath 1100, but Ford had little production experience with horizontally opposed engines, and there were concerns that a flat-four would be too wide.

The alternative Dearborn initially pursued was a Lancia-style narrow-angle V-4, with both banks sharing a common cylinder head to reduce cost and weight. This was to be an extremely short and narrow engine that could easily fit entirely ahead of the front axle. Initial conceptions included both 1.1- and 1.4-liter (66.5 or 83.8 cu.in.) versions.

Like the Falcon before it, the I-PF-4 also grew rapidly. The development team was likely aware that Ford market research had indicated a strong American preference for five/six-passenger seating, and while the FWD powertrain was a boon to packaging efficiency, the original package dimensions didn’t provide the desired interior space. Thus, the planned wheelbase of the I-PF-4 increased three times, and exterior length and width grew commensurately.

Despite the ever-swelling dimensions, the engineers in Dearborn were confident that the I-PF-4 could have a dry weight of less than 1,600 lb (725 kg) in production form, making it a substantial 385 lb (175 kg) lighter than the facelifted 1960 German Ford Taunus 12M. The FWD car’s target weight was subsequently adjusted upward to 1,630 lb (740 kg) dry, with a curb weight of about 1,700 lb (770 kg), but this would still have been very light for a car of its dimensions.

Cologne’s NPX-C5

Meanwhile, Ford-Werke was preparing to go in a very different direction. Its new American managing director John S. Andrews, who succeeded Erhard Vitger in March 1958, was initially preoccupied with the boom in mini-cars with engines under 1,000 cc (61 cu. in.) — whose share of the German market had recently swelled by 43.5 percent (from 20.2 percent of the market to 29.0 percent) — and with the increasing commercial moribundity of the Taunus 12M.

Cologne’s existing Taunus 12M was too big, too expensive, and too thirsty to compete with the mini-cars, and it was becoming increasingly dated. The 12M had made a splash when first introduced, but it was an early fifties design with an essentially prewar L-head (side-valve) engine, and all Ford-Werke had really done with in six years was a few minor tweaks and some de-contenting to bring down the price, which remained too high. Of course, the popular Volkswagen Beetle was an even older design, but the Beetle was substantially cheaper than the 12M, and significantly better built as well.

Ford-Werke had more luck with the pricier and more powerful Taunus 15M, but even that was no great shakes (its annual sales had never broken 40,000), and it didn’t help at the lower end of the market, where Ford-Werke was losing ground. By 1958, the 15M was gone and 12M sales had fallen below 20,000 units.

Andrews and Ford-Werke finance chief Robert G. Layton had no illusions about Ford-Werke being able to profitably compete in the mini-car market, short of merging with another automaker already producing such models. Further price cuts and a modest facelift temporarily resuscitated 12M sales in 1959, but Andrews knew that couldn’t last, and he still hoped to replace the existing car with something smaller and more modern, powered by an all-new water-cooled 1-liter (61 cu. in.) OHC four.

As initially conceived, this engine was to drive its single overhead camshaft with a rubber or nylon timing belt with plastic teeth, a new concept that hadn’t yet been tried in production. However, Ford-Werke engineering chief Jules A. Gutzeit also insisted on developing an alternative version with a conventional chain-driven camshaft. Had the engine gone into production, Gutzeit’s plan was to introduce the engine with a chain-driven cam and then transition to the belt-drive setup once the latter had proven itself. Prototypes of this engine produced up to 60 PS (44 kW) on the test stand, a very respectable specific output for 1958–1959, although production engines wouldn’t have been that powerful, at least to start.

Ford-Werke hoped to install this new OHC engine in an all-new C-segment sedan codenamed NPX-C5. This was to be an otherwise conventional front-engine, RWD model with MacPherson strut front suspension (something Ford-Werke had recently adopted for the larger Taunus 17M); a live rear axle; and an upright fuel tank, mounted in the right side of the trunk. The NPX-C5 was originally slated to have an overall length of 145.7 inches (3,700 mm), making it more than a foot (360 mm) shorter than the existing 12M and around 220 lb (100 kg) lighter.

The 1-liter (61 cu. in.) engine was to be standard in the NPX-C5, offering 34 PS (25.0 kW), and a 1.2-liter (73 cu. in.) version with 40 PS (29.4 kW) was to be optional. Overall length was increased during development to 153.5 inches (3,900 mm), but Ford-Werke were keen to keep it smaller than the existing Taunus 12M, and more in line with contemporary C-segment rivals.

V-4 Engines and the Ponypak

By the summer of 1959, Ford engineers in Dearborn were working on two competing V-4 engine designs: a narrow-angle engine (see the sidebar below) and an alternative design with a wider 60-degree bank angle, separate cylinder heads, and an open-deck block design that could be easily adapted for either cast iron or high-pressure die-cast aluminum. The 60-degree V-4 was heavier, wider, and somewhat more expensive than the narrow-angle engine, but it provided room for larger main bearings and had greater growth potential, including the intriguing possibility of creating a compact 60-degree V-6 that could share the same tooling.

Both V-4 engines suffered significant balance issues. The initial version of the narrow-angle V-4, with only two main bearings, was deemed unacceptable. The 60-degree engine had its own problems: It had an unbalanced vertical secondary force, like an inline-four, along with an unbalanced horizontal secondary couple and a severe unbalanced primary couple. The secondary forces and couples were manageable — the vertical shake was milder than an inline-four of the same bore and stroke dimensions, and the horizontal secondary couple was relatively small — but the primary couple was bad enough to make a balance shaft mandatory. This added further to the engine’s cost and weight, and the balance shaft did nothing to improve the secondary imbalance, so it still didn’t make the engine a paragon of smoothness.

Like the Chevrolet Corvair, which arrived in the fall of 1959, the I-PF-4 transaxle placed the differential ring and pinion between the clutch housing and the gearbox; the pinion was a hollow quill shaft through which passed the input shaft for the transmission gears. The quill shaft was expensive, but it was compact, and it allowed a direct drive top gear rather than the noisier all-indirect ratios of a typical FF or RR transaxle. There were to be both three-speed and all-synchro four-speed gearboxes, and the American market would have demanded an automatic; we’ve seen no specific details for the latter, although a speculative September 1961 article in Mechanix Illustrated plausibly suggested it would be an adaptation of the lightweight two-speed automatic developed for the Falcon.

The I-PF-4 had several engineering novelties beyond front-wheel drive. Roy Lunn had suggested revisiting a concept Ford Ltd. had explored in the early fifties, which involved mounting the front suspension arms on the transaxle case rather than on the unit body or its crossmembers. The idea of this layout, which was dubbed the “ponypak,” was that the mass of the engine and transaxle would serve as a damping weight, resisting road shocks to provide a more comfortable ride. The front suspension itself was to be by longitudinal torsion bars, pivoting on abutments mounted on the engine itself, with an unusual steering layout by sector and pinion. In back, there was to be a solid beam axle, suspended on then-novel longitudinal single-leaf springs like the “Mono-Plate” springs later used on the Chevrolet Chevy II/Nova and Camaro/Firebird; this promised to be cheaper and to reduce harshness by eliminating the inter-leaf friction of multi-leaf semi-elliptical springs.

A further novelty was the cooling system. A heater was standard, with a thermoswitch automatically activating the heater blower any time coolant temperature reached 205 degrees Fahrenheit (96 degrees Celsius) and turning it off if the coolant temperature fell below 198 degrees Fahrenheit (92 degrees Celsius). If the heater lever on the dashboard was turned off, the blower output was directed downward rather than into the cabin. In this way, the heater acted to supplement the radiator, which allowed the elimination of the normal engine-driven cooling fan. This saved a few horsepower as well as freeing up some space in the nose, although it meant the heater offered no air blending to vary the cabin temperature, and there was no way to run the blower without cabin heat, a headache in humid weather.

It may become apparent here that this was quite a list of novel and untried ideas for what was supposed to be an inexpensive economy car. Front-wheel drive was not yet as anathema at Ford as it became a decade later, when the prospect of using FWD for the B-segment model that became the Mk1 Fiesta sparked a multi-year battle, but it’s still curious that senior management in Dearborn, including McNamara, were willing to back such an unorthodox package. (It wasn’t Ford’s only FWD project either; for a time, there was serious consideration of adopting front-wheel drive for the Thunderbird.)

Nonetheless, Frank Theyleg later told journalist Karl Ludvigsen that it was the novelty of the FF “ponypak” helped to drive management interest in the subcompact project, calling it “the snowball that built the avalanche.” We suspect that the existence of the Falcon probably had something to do with that: If the Falcon had not yet existed, there probably would have been a greater push toward conventionality, but by the time the corporate Product Planning Committee got its first look at the I-PF-4 in June 1959, the very conventional Falcon was only about 90 days from Job One, which meant the first challenge for the Segment I engineering team was to demonstrate how their project differed from the car already nearing production.

During 1959, the I-PF-4 engineering team in Dearborn converted at least one Goliath into a test mule for the “ponypak” and cooling system. This was followed in January 1960 by two FWD Saab 93B sedans, whose engines were removed and their headlights awkwardly relocated from the grille to the front fender nacelles to make room for the V-4 engines and their cooling systems. A prototype 60-degree engine was installed in one test mule, with the narrow-angle V-4 in the other.

Company chairman Henry Ford II took an unexpected interest in the project and asked to borrow one of the Saab prototypes to try himself over the weekend. He returned it with a bent valve; asked what timetable the team anticipated for its launch; and said, “Make it 1963 and you’ve got yourself a program.” This was a victory, but it meant the still very experimental all-new model would have to be ready for production within just two years.

Ludvigsen’s account of this encounter (based on later interviews with the engineers involved) suggests that this tight deadline came as a rather jarring surprise. However, HFII was probably aware of the earlier “dream car” project and at least peripherally aware of Wilner Sundelson’s suggestion of a pan-European C-segment car back in 1956–1957. The original target date for those projects had been 1962, so the chairman might well have felt that a 1963 model year debut was consistent with the timing discussed three years earlier.

In any event, Ford was quite serious: In late March 1960, the project was transferred to Ford Division for further development as a production model. The narrow-angle V-4 was dropped, and the project received a new code name: Cardinal, which, as Ford officials were subsequently at pains to clarify, was intended to refer to the bird rather than the Catholic clerical rank. Its actual name in U.S. production would likely have been Redwing V-4; there were rumors that a Mercury version might be called Oriole. The Product Planning Committee approved the Cardinal project for U.S. production on May 16, 1960.

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 were an improvement on the ungainly American styling prototypes.

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.

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 Ford Division general marketing manager, 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.

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.

The Cardinal Lays a Curate’s Egg: The Taunus 12M P4

On July 17, 1962, Cologne finally bade farewell to the now very elderly 1952-vintage 12M. The facelifted car had managed to sell 215,471 units in three years, which, if hardly record-setting, was much better than John Andrews had feared back in 1958.

When the FWD Taunus 12M P4 debuted in September 1962, Ford-Werke officials were not very optimistic about its prospects either. It was new, which was good, and with a starting price of DM 5,330, it was a bit cheaper than its predecessor (and even more so if you considered that a heater, which was standard on the new car, had been an extra DM 160 on the old 12M, while a four-speed gearbox had been DM 75). However, the new 12M had a very peculiar mixture of vices and virtues.

Like the English Ford Cortina that made its public bow around the same time, the 12M P4 was really a class up from the contemporary C-segment in size and weight. It was significantly bigger than the Beetle, or the new Opel Kadett or Renault R8, as the following table illustrates. (We’ve also included the 1988 Honda Civic sedan, a C-segment car of 25 years later, as a more modern reference point.)

Major Dimensions, Taunus 12M P4 and Contemporaries (Plus 1988 Honda Civic Sedan)

Model	Overall Length (in/mm)	Wheelbase (in/mm)	Overall Width (in/mm)	Overall Height (in/mm)	Curb Weight (lb/kg)
Ford Taunus 12M (P4) sedan	167.2 in/4,248 mm	99.5 in/2,527 mm	62.8 in/1,594 mm	57.4 in/1,458 mm	1,863 lb/845 kg
Ford Consul Cortina sedan	170.5 in/4,330 mm	98.0 in/2,490 mm	63.0 in/1,600 mm	57.4 in/1,448 mm	1,766 lb/801 kg
Volkswagen Beetle 1200 (standard)	160.2 in/4,070 mm	94.5 in/2,400 mm	60.6 in/1,540 mm	59.1 in/1,500 mm	1,609 lb/730 kg
Ford Anglia 105E sedan	153.5 in/3,900 mm	90.5 in/2,300 mm	57.3 in/1,455 mm	56.6 in/1,438 mm	1,695 lb/769 kg
Opel Kadett A sedan	154.4 in/3,923 mm	91.5 in/2,325 mm	57.9 in/1,470 mm	55.1 in/1,410 mm	1,521 lb/690 kg
Renault Dauphine sedan	157.1 in/3,937 mm	89.4 in/2,267 mm	58.7 in/1,524 mm	55.5 in/1,441 mm	1,43 lb/650 kg
Renault R8 sedan	157.1 in/3,990 mm	89.4 in/2,270 mm	58.7 in/1,490 mm	55.5 in/1,410 mm	1,610 lb/730 kg
1988 Honda Civic sedan	166.5 in/4,230 mm	98.4 in/2,500 mm	66.5 in/1,690 mm	53.5 in/1,360 mm	1,874 lb/850 kg

However, where the Cortina made its class-straddling position a commercial virtue, offering buyers a bigger, more powerful car than the Anglia for a fairly modest price premium, the 12M seemed like a stripped-down big sedan trying, not very convincingly, to pass itself off as a small economy model.

Despite its dimensions and the advantage of a flat cabin floor, the FWD 12M P4 was not substantially more commodious than the RWD Cortina. Front-seat passengers enjoyed generous legroom in the 12M, and the standard front bench seat (not common on German cars of this period) made it possible to carry a child between the driver and front passenger, but headroom was ungenerous for taller drivers, rear seat room was unexceptional, and rear passengers didn’t have enough thigh support because the seat cushion had been shortened to give the illusion of greater legroom. Compared to a Beetle, the 12M had an enormous trunk, but the utility of its impressive nominal volume was also compromised by a small opening, high liftover height, the intrusion of the rear wheel houses, and the position of the spare tire. Moreover, the 12M was far from luxurious in either fit and finish or equipment, and the paucity of brightwork made it seem rather austere even by German standards.

It was also quite heavy for its class and era. As Bernhard Osswald had predicted, Dearborn’s original weight targets had proved wildly optimistic: The production 12M P4 was some 263 lb (120 kg) heavier than the initial I-PF-4 target. Embarrassingly, the FWD 12M was also almost 100 lb (44 kg) heavier than the RWD Cortina, which had benefited from an aggressive program of cost and weight reduction.

The P4’s weight inevitably hurt its performance. With its 1,183 cc (72.2 cu. in.) V-4 engine making a modest 40 PS DIN (29.4 kW; advertised in some markets as 50 hp SAE gross), the 12M could be outrun by the lighter Volkswagen Beetle at around-town speeds, and keeping up with traffic required full use of the (excellent) column-shifted four-speed gearbox. Ford-Werke initially claimed 0–62 mph (0–100 km/h) acceleration of 27.5 seconds, but the German car magazine auto motor und sport (AMS) couldn’t do better than 30 seconds, and the auto club magazine ADAC-Motorwelt needed 31 seconds. As expected of a German car, the 12M could cruise at its top speed of 78 mph (125 km/h), although it took its time getting there, and slowing down produced substantial brake fade. The factory’s claimed 31.4 mpg (7.5 L/100 km) was possible only if you stayed in the slow lane, although AMS found that full-speed, full-throttle Autobahn cruising still returned a respectable 25 mpg (9.4 L/100 km); their testers recorded 28.7 mpg (8.2 L/100 km/h) overall.

Front-wheel drive gave the 12M excellent crosswind stability and fine wet-weather traction, and ride quality was exceptionally compliant for a car of this size and vintage. Handling was another matter. Unsurprisingly, the 12M P4 had substantial body lean and heavy understeer in fast turns, but it also had a tendency to hoist its inside rear wheel in dramatic fashion, which the controversial Stuttgart-based consumer testing magazine DM (Deutsches Mark) claimed could make the car roll over if pushed too hard. Ford-Werke officials were initially prepared to contest these allegations in court, which wouldn’t have been the first or the last time DM was sued — in 1964, Volkswagen filed a DM 10 million lawsuit over the magazine’s extremely negative long-term review of the Type 3 Volkswagen 1500 S. However, Andrews backed down after test drivers in Cologne found that the 12M could in fact end up on its roof in this way. This seems to have been a very rare occurrence in the real world, but AMS road testers repeatedly expressed concerns about the 12M’s unexpected penchant for abrupt trailing-throttle oversteer. Tucking in the nose if the driver lifted off the throttle in a fast turn was not an uncommon trait among older FWD cars, but it wasn’t in keeping with the P4’s otherwise sedate manners, and it could give unwary drivers a nasty surprise. Worse, carburetor starvation in hard left-hand turns could potentially produce the same effect even without lifting, albeit at much higher cornering speeds than most 12M drivers were likely to attempt.

Complicating that issue was the P4’s steering, which drew many complaints. Not only was it under-geared (steering ratio was 22:1) and lifeless in the customary American manner, it was also imprecise enough to frustrate quick evasive maneuvers. This was due in large part to the ponypak layout: Attaching the suspension arms to the powertrain rather than the unit body forced an uneasy compromise between chassis tuning and the need to isolate the body structure from the V-4 engine’s inherent secondary imbalance. The engine mounts were soft enough to allow significant compliance steer, which contributed materially to the vague steering response. On top of that, you could sometimes feel the powertrain shifting on its mounts (which wasn’t nearly as severe as the bucking that had plagued the prototypes, but could still be disconcerting), and some road surfaces would set up an unpleasant front wheel shake. Despite these handicaps, the engine wasn’t isolated enough to mask its vibration, especially at idle, which made the 12M feel crude despite its cushy ride. The V-4 was also unpleasantly loud on acceleration, although the lack of fan noise provided some mitigation at cruising speeds.

Ford-Werke in this period still couldn’t approach Volkswagen build quality, and the reliability of the 12M was a mixed bag. The V-4 engine, transaxle, and driveshafts were surprisingly robust, especially given that they were all-new, but Automobil-Report repair data revealed frequent problems with the 12M’s electrical and exhaust systems — almost half of first-year owners needed unscheduled exhaust repairs, perhaps reflecting the stresses imposed by excessive powertrain movement. Paint flaws and body rattles were common, and rust could be a problem. Also, as AMS discovered when a rock hit their long-term test car’s windshield, the P4 didn’t have laminated safety glass.

The car’s American origins were by this time common knowledge, which wasn’t necessarily to the 12M’s advantage in European markets. John Andrews made a game attempt to tell the German press that the new Taunus 12M was 100 percent a Cologne design, but this fooled no one. Almost everyone connected with the auto industry had heard of the Cardinal project by this time, and even if they somehow hadn’t, the 12M P4 was marked by many obvious concessions to American tastes. Reinhard Seiffert of auto motor und sport compared it to an American attempt to replicate European beer, which strikes us as one of the most cordially damning things a German reviewer could say about a product.

Nonetheless, if the new 12M was still a curate’s egg, good only in parts, it had enough points of interest to make it worth a look, which hadn’t always been the case with its predecessor. Initial sales were very respectable, neck and neck with the cheaper Kadett, and Ford anticipated more: After spending years futilely chasing mergers with other automakers as a way of expanding Ford-Werke production volume, the German subsidiary established an all-new assembly plant in Belgium, along the Albert Canal outside the town of Genk, at a reported cost of $120 million USD. This plant, perhaps the most dramatic indicator to that point of the company’s faith in the Common Market, began producing the Taunus 12M in August 1963 and was fully operational by 1964. Genk would eventually assemble more than half of all P4 production and more than three-fourths of the subsequent P6 line.

In July 1963, British Petroleum (BP) approached Ford-Werke to propose using the Taunus 12M for endurance record attempts, as a way of simultaneously promoting the new BP Longlife motor oil and the durability of the FWD car. A 12M randomly selected from a French Ford depot in Rouen and fitted with safety equipment was driven continuously at top speed for 141 days on the Miramas Autodrome oval track in southern France, driving the equivalent of the distance from the Earth to the moon at an average speed of 65 mph (105 km/h). There was an interruption of about 12 hours on October 29 after driver Michael Grammond went off the road and rolled twice, but the extremely battered car was hastily hammered back into driveable shape and went on, eventually completing 221,475 miles (356,430 km) before Ford-Werke and BP called a halt on November 28, having set 140 international and world class records. Remarkably, the record-setting car eventually ended up in private hands, still wearing its many scars, honorably earned.

The Cardinal Molts

The termination of the U.S. Cardinal/Redwing was a blow to Ford-Werke in that the new engine plant was initially operating well below its expected capacity, with no U.S. production to keep the factory operating in the black. However, the silver lining was that Ford-Werke was no longer obliged to kowtow to American tastes and priorities, and could finally tackle the 12M P4’s assorted shortcomings.

Leading the agenda was more power. The 1,183 cc (72.2 cu. in.) V-4 remained standard throughout the model run, but from December 1962, there was also a new 12M TS (for “Tourensport”) model with a 1,498 cc (91.4 cu. in.) engine. This was not quite the same as the aborted Cardinal A engine, which had a smaller bore and a longer stroke (giving a displacement of 1,466 cc or 89.5 cu. in.). The TS engine had the same stroke as the 1.2-liter engine, but a bigger bore, a bigger carburetor, and a higher compression ratio, giving 55 PS (40.5 kW; 62 hp SAE gross) and 80 lb-ft (107 N-m) of torque, compared to just 58 lb-ft (80 N-m) for the base engine.

Even with a taller standard axle ratio, the extra power and torque had a transformative effect: 0–62 mph (0–100 km/h) acceleration times fell from around 30 seconds to 17 seconds or less, with much better flexibility, while top speed was now 84–85 mph (135–138 km/h), comparable to a six-cylinder American compact. While the base 12M was a slug, the 12M TS was quick enough to make it something of a performance bargain. Handling was still a weak point, but the TS had more comprehensive standard equipment, including front bucket seats, nicer trim, and thick carpeting that provided better sound insulation. The TS package cost an extra DM 870 — over 15 percent more expensive than the base car — but it was really a much better all-around value. Starting in September 1963, a cheaper 1.5-liter engine became available as a standalone option on the 12M, without the TS trim and equipment. This had a lower compression ratio and the smaller carburetor from the base engine, giving 50 PS (36.8 kW; 57 hp SAE gross) and 76 lb-ft (103 N-m) for an extra DM 120. It was thirstier than the 1.2-liter car — AMS averaged 24.4 mpg (9.7 L/100 km) — but its performance was much sprightlier.

A two-door Kombiwagen (station wagon) was added to the line in March 1963, followed in September by a four-door sedan and a 2+2 coupe, the latter only available in TS form. From August 1963, the coachbuilder Karl Deutsch offered a 2+2 cabriolet, although since it cost almost 50 percent more than the coupe on which it was based, the cabriolet was rare.

Somewhat surprisingly, Ford-Werke homologated the P4 in the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) Touring class in the fall of 1962. Even with the TS engine, the FWD 12M was underpowered for its class; in 1964, the factory ran four specially prepared 12M coupes at the 6 Hours of Nürburgring, with undistinguished results and various technical problems. However, the 12M did achieve some rally success: Rudi Golderer used a 12M to win the German Rally Championship in 1964, while Alfred Burkhardt and Heinrich Zertari took the championship in another 12M the following year.

The rally drivers benefited from some recent improvements to the 12M’s handling. Throughout 1963, Ford-Werke engineers had grappled with the various issues posed by the P4’s “ponypak.” This was eventually addressed in two stages. The first step was to revise the transverse leaf spring to use two spring mounts rather than one, which provided greater front roll stiffness and self-centering action. The two-point spring mount was similar to the latest transverse front spring designed by Dante Giacosa and Ettore Cordiano for the new Autobianchi Primula, and was subject to Fiat patents; Ford-Werke body development chief Waldemar Ebers drove to Turin in the spring of 1963 to negotiate a licensing agreement.

Testing of the new suspension began in the summer of 1963, and the revised front springs were added in production in the late spring of 1964, perhaps six weeks before the 6 Hours of Nürburging. The early P4’s rear anti-roll bar was deleted at the same time, and firmer shock absorbers were added for better body control, at a slight cost in ride quality.

The next step was to abandon the ponypak concept entirely, replacing the existing lower wishbones with wide lower A-arms attached to the unit body rather than to the gearbox housing. This was implemented in production in September 1964, and markedly improved the P4’s deportment. The 12M would still oversteer if the driver lifted off the throttle in a turn, but the previous steering vagueness was greatly reduced, and the revised suspension allowed the powertrain mounts to be re-tuned to better isolate the V-4 engine from the body structure. The V-4 wasn’t any quieter or smoother than before, but its coarse buzz was now at a more comfortable remove, particularly at idle. On all models, the new front suspension was also accompanied by standard front disc brakes, providing much more consistent stopping performance with less fade.

At the same time, the TS engine got a higher compression ratio, bringing output to 65 PS (47.8 kW, 73 hp SAE gross) and 83.2 lb-ft (117 N-m) of torque. It now required premium fuel, but it still returned respectable fuel economy; Ford-Werke claimed 24.8 mpg (9.5 L/100 km). More than three-fifths of all 12M buyers settled for the base engine, which was cheaper and more economical, but the late 12M TS was probably the most desirable iteration of the P4 generation: a little homely-looking and still not terribly agile, but a comfortable cruiser with sprightly performance and reassuring winter traction, for a palatable price. Like all late 12M P4 models, it also had revised interior ventilation, with “Vario-Air” vents on either end of the dashboard rather than footwell flaps (which provided greater air volume, but were difficult to adjust while driving), and a new automatic choke. It was a far cry from the smaller, cheaper RWD car Ford-Werke had wanted to built, but in its maturity, the 12M TS wasn’t a bad effort.

With no U.S. model, total Taunus 12M P4 production through July 1966 was only about half the original target for the Cardinal program. Still, 680,206 cars in four years was hardly a disaster — it was 19 percent better than the old 12M and 15M had managed in 10 years, and at times, it outpaced the Opel Kadett A. In West Germany, interest in the FWD model helped to boost Ford-Werke market share to 14.4 percent in 1963, dipping to 11.3 percent in 1964 and 11.5 percent in 1965. Starting in 1964, the 12M also accounted for a good chunk of Cologne’s export business; 41 percent of P4 production was sold outside Germany. (There were no official U.S. imports of the P4, but the Taunus V-4 engine was eventually offered as an industrial and marine engine in the U.S. as well as in Europe.)

Where the 12M looked far less successful was in comparison to the English Ford Cortina. German Fords were rare in the UK (although a few were offered there in right-hand drive form), and English Fords were not often seen in the Bundesrepublik, but the two subsidiaries’ products still competed directly in some export markets. The Cortina was quicker and more agile than the 12M, and while it didn’t have the FWD car’s flat floor, it gave away little in usable interior space. Its appeal was bolstered by a lengthy options list and an array of upscale and sporty models — including the racy Lotus-Cortina — that demonstrated their sporting bona fides in sedan racing as well as rally competition. Offered at generally attractive prices, the Cortina was very popular, selling more than 1 million units between 1962 and 1966. Since it was less mechanically complex than the FWD Taunus 12M, it would have been more profitable even if their sales had been equal, but outselling the P4 by almost 50 percent made the Cortina a huge breakout hit, where the 12M’s commercial performance was merely okay.

From Cardinal to Prelate: The 12M/15M P6

While the later Taunus 12M P4 was still plainly a Cardinal despite its detail improvements, the next-generation Taunus 12M/15M was a substantially different bird. Known internally as the P6 (the P5 being the 1965 17M/20M), it was developed under the codename Prälat (Prelate), another Catholic clerical rank.

Designed by Wes Dahlberg, the P6 looked much more modern, albeit in a rather generic mid-sixties manner, with squared-off lines that didn’t entirely hide some structural carryover from the P4. As before, there were two- and four-door sedans, a Kombiwagen, and a notchback coupe; an awkward-looking Rambler Tarpon-like fastback coupe was mercifully stillborn.

The new models were a bit longer, lower, and wider than before, albeit on an unchanged wheelbase. Surprisingly, they were also quite aerodynamic, with drag coefficients of 0.38 or less — outstanding for this period.

Under the skin, there were some extensive mechanical changes, including another new front suspension, new steering, improved “Flow-Away” ventilation, and a revised cooling system. The revised front suspension again had wide lower A-arms, but the transverse leaf spring was gone, replaced by MacPherson struts with coil springs, which avoided the need for further Fiat royalty payments. There were no anti-roll bars front or rear. Steering was now by rack and pinion, and less under-geared than before (with a ratio of 19:1 rather than 22:1), so it was more precise, but inevitably heavier. Teves front disc brakes remained standard.

The V-4 engine now had a conventional cooling system with an engine-driven cooling fan. The P4 system had worked reasonably well on the move, but it was marginal in slow-moving traffic in hot weather; there may also have been concerns about production commonization, since the V-4 was now much more widely used than it had been in 1962. Ford-Werke had been obliged to find other ways to utilize the excess capacity of the Cologne-Niehl engine plant, so the Taunus 17M now used the 1,498 cc (91.4 cu. in.) V-4 and a longer-stroke 1,699 cc (103.7 cu. in.) version in place of the old inline fours, while the 20M introduced the new V-6 version, initially in 1,998 cc (121.9 cu. in.) form. (The V-6 got off to a bad start, suffering early head gasket sealing problems, but it would prove to be an extremely important and long-lived Ford corporate engine.) Another important new application was the German version of the Ford Transit van, the first true cooperative program between Ford-Werke and Ford Ltd. In mid-1966, Ford-Werke also began supplying the 1.5-liter version to Saab AB for the Saab 95, 96, and Sonett V4.

For the 12M P6, the base engine was bored out to 1,305 cc (79.6 cu. in.) — although Ford-Werke advertised it as 1,288 cc (78.6 cu. in.), its taxable displacement under new West German tax rules — and got a higher compression ratio, giving 50 PS DIN (36.8 kW; 63 hp SAE gross) and 68.7 lb-ft (95 N-m) of torque. The 1,498 cc (91.4 cu. in.) engine was again available in regular-fuel fuel form, now with 55 PS (40.5 kW; 75 hp SAE gross), or in high-compression TS form, again with 65 PS (47.8 kW; 80 hp SAE gross) and 84.6 lb-ft (117 N-m) of torque. A 12-volt electrical system was belatedly optional, although it wouldn’t become standard until September 1967. Since the restyling brought no significant increase in weight, performance was somewhat improved. Ford-Werke claimed the 12M 1300 could reach 62 mph (100 km/h) in 23 seconds and a top speed of 81 mph (130 km/h).

One significant and potentially confusing aspect of the P6 redesign was the return of the 15M designation, which bears some explanation. The previous Taunus 15M, offered between 1955 and 1958, had been relatively successful, but Ford-Werke dropped it in mid-1958 so it wouldn’t compete with the bigger Taunus 17M. This quickly proved to be a commercial miscalculation, but rather than revive the 15M as a distinct model, Ford-Werke made its engine optional on the 12M. The 12M P4 had continued that strategy, but for the P6, Ford-Werke decided to again differentiate the base and 1.5-liter models, giving the latter distinctive styling, more equipment, and a higher price to fill the gap between the 12M and the bigger 17M. A decade earlier, Ford-International officials had chided Ford Ltd. for this sort of thing, calling it “the dental school of product planning,” but it had paid off handsomely for Dagenham, and Cologne, whose financial performance remained checkered, was keen to follow suit.

The Last Days of FWD at Ford-Werke

In most respects, the P6 versions of the 12M and 15M were now competent but uninspired middle-class cars. They had few really glaring faults other than engine noise and annoyingly heavy brake effort — a brake servo became optional in February 1968 — but they also lacked any real defining virtues. The P6 still had good winter traction, but even with all the chassis and steering changes, it couldn’t match the road manners of FWD rivals of newer basic design. Lift-throttle oversteer was no longer a problem, but the heavier steering exaggerated the heavy understeer, so the car had to be muscled through fast turns, and firmer damping made the ride significantly less plush than before. Cabin space remained above-average for the class, but the P6’s new front bucket seats reduced the benefits of the flat floor, and the interior fittings and equipment retained some lingering reminders of the Cardinal’s pfennig-pinching crudity.

Where the P4 had made its best showing in 1.5-liter form, the 12M P6 was now more competitive than its pricier brother. The 1.3-liter engine gave the 12M adequate if uninspired performance, and its interior space and comfort offered some compensation for its cumbersome handling and lack of verve. The 15M was faster, but it was now somewhat overmatched against middle-class rivals. In a series of 1967 comparison tests, auto motor und sport ranked the 12M second among five lower-middle-class cars, but the 15M TS managed only fifth place in its segment, well behind the Fiat 125, Renault 16, Audi L, and Opel Olympia despite its lower price. AMS remarked that the 15M seemed dated, a bad sign for a car that had then been on sale only about 15 months.

The P6’s arrival happened to coincide with a European recession and a sharp downturn in the new car market. Its impact wasn’t limited to Ford — Opel was also hit hard, as was Volkswagen — but the economic slump resulted in the first actual decrease in Ford-Werke annual production in nearly two decades. Posted profits for 1967 were about one-sixth the 1966 level, and sales of the 17M and 20M slipped so much that Ford-Werke had to shut down the assembly lines to give dealers more time to clear growing stockpiles. The new 12M and 15M were among the few bright spots in this grim commercial picture. Their sales weren’t really any better than the P4’s, but they were still in reasonable demand, which was more than could be said for the larger German Ford models.

This might help to explain the curious expansion of the P6 range for the 1968 model year, which included the return of the 1,183 cc (72.2 cu. in.) engine, now with a higher compression ratio and 45 PS (33.1 kW; 57 hp SAE gross); new 12M 1300 S and 12M TS models with a premium-fuel version of the 1.3-liter engine, producing 53 PS (39.0 kW; 65 hp SAE gross); and a 1700 S version of the 15M TS, using the 1,699 cc (103.7 cu. in.) engine from the 17M, with 70 PS (51.5 kW; 85 hp SAE gross) and 99 lb-ft (137 N-m) of torque). Mid-year, the premium-fuel 1.5- and 1.7-liter engines also became optional on the regular 15M as well as the 15M TS, while the 1.7-liter and low-compression 1.5-liter engines became optionally available for the 12M, at least in West Germany and certain other markets. All these choices were in addition to the existing 12M 1300, 15M 1500, and 15M TS 1500 S models, suggesting a somewhat desperate attempt to cover all possible bases. All P6 engines now had the previously optional 12-volt electrical system, and from late 1967, a revised closed-deck cylinder block.

Introduced midway through the 1968 model year was the most interesting P6 variant: the 15M RS, which had been shown at the IAA show in Frankfurt in September 1967 and went on sale in March 1968. Aimed at the Opel Kadett Rallye, it featured the high-compression 1700 S engine, firmer damping, styled 14-inch wheels, various exterior dress-up items, and a sporty interior treatment with floor shifter and full instrumentation. It was something of a paper tiger, with performance — 0–62 mph (0–100 km/h) in under 15 seconds, with a top speed of 95 to 98 mph (153 to 158 km/h) — that wasn’t in the same league as the Mk2 Cortina 1600GT or 1600E, much less the far more powerful Kadett Rallye 1.9. Nonetheless, the RS accounted for a good chunk of 15M sales.

Ford-Werke was by this time trying to downplay the Taunus name, which had disappeared from the bigger 17M and 20M/23M with the launch of the P7 in August 1967 and was deleted from the 12M and 15M a month later.

A last revision of the P6 line arrived in August 1968, bringing a new instrument panel with a round rather than ribbon speedometer and, for cars with the 1.5- or 1.7-liter engines, Löbro constant velocity joints rather than the original Rzeppa type. The TS was replaced with a more luxury-oriented XL model, and the 12M dropped both the 1200 and high-compression 1300 S engines.

The pruning of the smaller-engined models may have been intended to avoid competition with the newest German Ford: the Mk1 Escort. Like the Cardinal-based 12M P4, this was a somewhat reluctant inheritance; the new Escort was designed by Ford Ltd. as a replacement for the Anglia 105E, and had gone on sale in the UK earlier in the year. It finally gave Ford-Werke the modern, conventionally engineered RWD C-segment car they’d wanted for more than a decade, but the Mk1 Escort wasn’t a big hit in the Bundesrepublik — German buyers didn’t love the styling, and a basic Escort 1100 wasn’t dramatically cheaper than the bigger 12M 1300. Nonetheless, the Escort brought in a useful chunk of additional business that didn’t cannibalize sales of the bigger cars.

Even more useful was the launch in January 1969 of the sporty Capri coupe, which not only sold very well, but was also a profitable and desirable image-booster, something previous Ford-Werke models had managed only fleetingly.

Although overshadowed, underwhelming, and by now the oldest models in the German Ford lineup, the 12M and 15M remained fairly consistent if not outstanding sellers through the end of the model run in July 1970.

A Unified European Ford Line

The arrival of the Escort was in many respects the shape of things to come for Ford-Werke. In the early summer of 1967, John Andrews, who had been promoted in 1965 to vice president of Ford’s European Automobile Group, proposed establishing a new European holding company to unify the management of Ford of England, Ford of Germany, and Ford’s other European subsidiaries.

From a product standpoint, the Mk1 Transit had already shown the way forward. It was not yet a truly unified design, since production logistics meant the English and German versions had different powertrains, but it was as close as Ford had come since the thirties, and it let Ford take advantage of the emerging economic alliances in Europe. (The original rationale was that Ford Ltd. could built the Transit for the European Free Trade Area, of which the UK was a member, while Ford-Werke would serve the European Economic Community.) With the European recession, such collaboration seemed like the most sensible course of action, particularly since total combined British and European automobile production would shortly exceed that of the U.S.

The result was the creation of Ford of Europe, Inc., with Andrews as chairman and Robert Layton, who had succeeded Andrews as managing director of Ford-Werke in 1965, as vice chairman. It was headquartered in England, in part for tax reasons and in part because Ford Ltd. was still in a far better business position than Ford-Werke. The establishment of Ford of Europe did not actually change the ownership of the national subsidiaries, but it did bring about an extensive organizational restructuring. In practical terms, it also meant Ford-Werke products would be brought in line with the generally more successful English Ford offerings, filled out by models new to both Ford of England and Ford of Germany.

This consolidation left no place for the FWD cars. Commercially speaking, the P4 and P6 had been solid if not spectacular performers, selling around 100,000 units a year in West Germany, and the P6 had eventually banished most of the lingering Cardinal eccentricities. Ford-Werke could have continued to build on that foundation — FWD now even had some defenders in Cologne, which hadn’t been the case earlier in the decade — but the bottom line was that the P6 had sold 668,187 units in four years where the Mk2 Cortina had sold more than a million in the same period, again with lower costs and greater profit margins.

For 1971, therefore, the FWD 12M and 15M would be replaced with a new RWD car, again called Taunus, but obviously based on the Mk3 Cortina (and known internally as the Taunus TC, for “Taunus-Cortina”). The TC would be a conventional D-segment model, no longer feigning to straddle the C-segment, which was now the purview of the Escort; Ford of Germany wouldn’t have another FWD car until the arrival of the Mk1 Fiesta in 1976. It would take several more years for Ford to establish a truly unified European lineup, but by the early eighties, British and German Ford products were more alike than different. By then, Ford-Werke had also achieved a more dominant role in European Ford product development.

Cardinal Aftermath

In the 1961 report that helped Iacocca to justify killing the U.S. Cardinal project, Jack Eckhold predicted that there would be a need for a car like the Cardinal about 15 years in the future. That this happened to coincide with the eventual launch of the Ford Fiesta was pure happenstance; an internal battle was already brewing by mid-1969 over the need for a B-segment car smaller and cheaper than the Escort, which was too big and too expensive for many buyers outside Western Europe and the U.S. This fight, which we’ve previously chronicled, closely paralleled the arguments over the C-segment a decade earlier, with some factions urging that Ford risked shutting itself out of emerging markets by not having such a car and others insisting that it was waste of money to pursue a low-profit segment that some Ford executives confidently proclaimed would soon disappear completely. The trend in postwar Ford products, even in Europe, had almost always been upward in size and price, and any proposal to the contrary met with fierce resistance, whatever the market trend data showed.

We very much doubt that Eckhold’s remarks (to which we don’t have access except via Kurt Ludvigsen’s description in Special Interest Autos No. 41) rose to the level of a serious proposal. In product planning terms, 15 years in the future meant “don’t worry about it”: not so far into the realm of science fiction that it mightn’t be worth an advanced study or two, but safely beyond the reach of even long-lead product development. The immediate object of Eckhold’s report was almost certainly to reinforce the conclusion Lee Iacocca had already reached: that the Cardinal wasn’t something Ford Division needed, either then or in the immediately foreseeable future.

Was Iacocca right? In the short term, probably — the styling of the Cardinal A did have a dowdy Rambler American vibe, something that became a veritable marketing death sentence in the U.S. by the mid-sixties, so it probably wouldn’t have been a strong seller, at least in sedan form. The greater immediate risk to Ford Division would have been cannibalization, which was already an issue with the Falcon. Although Ford had sold more than 400,000 Falcons for 1960, total Ford Division sales actually declined slightly, and the division lost more than four percentage points of U.S. market share (from 27.3 percent in 1959 to 22.6 percent in 1960). It appears likely that the Falcon primarily attracted the same entry-level buyers who had previously been buying the full-size Custom 300, which in previous years had been the cheapest U.S.-made Ford; its sales dropped from 272,726 in 1959 to almost nothing in 1960. The last thing Ford needed was to repeat that process with the Falcon and the Cardinal/Redwing. Even if the Redwing wasn’t hopelessly unprofitable on a unit basis, as Iacocca insisted it would be, shifting entry-level buyers from a $2,200 product to a $1,950 one and then a $1,750 one over the course of four model years wouldn’t have looked good for the division’s balance sheet.

This was the idée fixe that doomed most U.S. attempts to develop viable subcompacts: the presumption that only kooks bought smaller cars for any reason other than penury, so the only way to sell such models in any numbers was to cut costs to the bone, which also precluded any real profit. Ironically, the strongest counterargument was Iacocca’s own Mustang, but it was a lesson that Detroit never really absorbed, and the Cardinal was handicapped by that thinking from its inception: By European standards, the Cardinal was neither very small nor particularly inexpensive, but it was tailored for American cheapskates, just as its road manners were tailored for American driving styles, and even eight years of revisions and refinements couldn’t wholly erase that stigma. Could something more have been done with the basic package? In principle, maybe, but Ford Division was unlikely to do so when there was far more money to be made on the simpler, more technologically orthodox Mustang. Moreover, even the German Prelate/P6, which had less dowdy styling and completely abandoned the original “ponypak” concept, was still not very competitive with the better European FWD cars except on price.

Nonetheless, the death of the subcompact market that Iacocca had confidently predicted in 1961–1962 never came to pass, and the decline in American buyers’ interest in smaller cars was strictly temporary. U.S. Renault sales collapsed beyond recovery in the early sixties, but U.S. Volkswagen sales did not, exceeding 300,000 for the first time in 1964, and within a few years, Nissan/Datsun and Toyota also became serious players in North America. Moreover, while Renault was no longer having much luck selling cars in the States, it had no such problems in Europe, where Renault production climbed from about half a million units a year in the early sixties to nearly three-quarters of a million by 1967–1968.

Compromised as they were, the Taunus 12M/15M P4 and P6 were therefore important products for Ford-Werke through a difficult period. If they were ultimately dead ends in terms of product development, they provided some useful building blocks for Ford’s European future, including the Cologne-Niehl engine plant, the assembly plant in Genk, and the long-lived Taunus V-4/Cologne V-6 engine family. Ford-Werke built 4,455,009 60-degree Taunus V-4 engines through 1985, with the related V-6 family accounting for a staggering 14,277,474 engines through 2011, 8,724,600 of those the 4.0-liter (244 cu. in.) OHV and SOHC engines once ubiquitous in Ford’s profit-spinning trucks and SUVs. It wasn’t the payoff Ford senior management expected back in 1960, but Ford probably did get its money’s worth in engine production alone. Significantly, a lot of that payoff might never have been possible if not for the Cardinal project. Even though the U.S. version was canceled, the expectation that the FWD car would also be built and sold in the States made it significantly easier for Ford management to justify the necessary European investments, which Dearborn had been resisting for years.

In his 1984 memoir, Iacocca generously allowed that the Cardinal would have gone over better in the U.S. in the seventies, after the 1973–1974 OPEC oil embargo. By that time, of course, the P4 and P6 were long dead, but for a few years later in the decade, the U.S. did get a federalized version of the Mk1 Fiesta. The Fiesta was relatively short-lived in the U.S. due to high European demand and importation limits for the new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations, and so for 1981, it was succeeded by a locally built version of the FWD Escort, which was just as severely compromised for American tastes as the original Cardinal had been. Where the European Mk3 Escort overcame a bumpy launch to become a respected C-segment player, the American car was seldom more than a bargain basement special, again selling more on low price than on merit.

Ford subsequently revisited the “world car” idea several more times, usually with very mixed results. The priorities and expectations of major automotive markets were still just too different, and the economies of scale were seldom as attractive in practice as they seemed like they should be, complicated by factors like shifting exchange rates. With Ford’s share of the European market diminishing precipitously, they’ll likely keep trying, although given the trends in electrification and the fact that Ford no longer makes any passenger cars other than a diminishing number of Mustang coupes, any true “world vehicle” Ford fields may be far removed from the now-extinct Fiesta, Focus, or Mondeo/Contour, much less their almost forgotten FWD ancestors.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

You can purchase the author’s notes for this article — a 21-page, 8,500-word document (revised extensively on August 16, 2024) with section-by-section annotations containing additional discussion and references — from the Ate Up With Motor Patreon shop: Ford Cardinal/Taunus 12M Author’s Notes (rev1)

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NOTES ON SOURCES

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