Mechanic’s Tale: Ford Follies

MORE:

Mechanic's Tale: The Big Cat by Douglas Flint (8/21/2006)
I fell in love with a machine - and lost.

More Mechanic's Tales from Doug Flint  

The first six months of 1942 must have been a tough time to be an American without getting seriously depressed. There was a seemingly endless series of American defeats at the hands of the Imperial Japanese forces. Thankfully their winning streak was stopped cold at Midway. If you care about the U.S. auto industry, it feels like it’s been 1942 for ten years now. When does their Battle of Midway come? When do they make a stand and say, “We’re not conceding one more percent of market share?”

What America needs

What’s new this week? While all of America went gaga over the video of the Lexus capable of parallel parking itself, I was doing a 30,000-mile check on a Ford Focus and, as is the custom, went to change the air filter, but I couldn’t seem to get to it. I called Ford to learn what I was doing wrong. I didn’t believe what I was told so I checked several sources. The air filter is a “permanent part,” not serviceable separate from the housing, costing $387 and expected to last 150,000 miles. Have you ever looked at an air filter that has been in a car just 50,000 miles? It looks like an ad for black lung disease.

About ten years ago Ford announced that the fuel filters on their trucks were lifetime parts, not expected to be replaced until they all ground to a halt somewhere around 60,000 miles. So I’ve got it all wrong. America doesn’t want advanced features, smooth reliable engines, and good transmissions. No, what America needs is a $387 air filter.

That coupled with news of the demise of the once number-one seller, the Taurus, should send Ford stock rocketing. Especially when all those Focus buyers go to replace their air filters. By the way, the air filter on the self-parking Lexus lists for $29. (What a bunch of dopes. How do they expect to make any money?)

It’s not that hard

It’s a little like watching the Washington Redskins play football. How can they make a game that involves just a few fundamentals such as running, passing, blocking, and tackling look so hard? Look at the now discontinued Ford Taurus, clearly a car that for all its flaws was bought in huge numbers. From 1986 until the last one rolls down the line, very soon, the base engine remained the 3.0-liter pushrod jalopy-boat-anchor six.

Now before anyone writes to correct me I know the real base engine on the original Taurus was a 2.5-liter boat anchor four, but they only sold ten of those. So for all practical purposes the 3.0 was the base engine and remained so for the life of the car. It wasn’t a bad effort for 1986, but the day of a 20-year engine cycle is over. The Toyota Camry, starting from 1986 to today, has had four different base engines, each substantially better than the last. Same for the Honda Accord, and those are the rivals that beat the Taurus.

I recently owned a 1996 Mercury Sable (sister to the Taurus). It was a very nice car! It had the optional Duratec DOHC V-6 and could easily outperform the Camry or Accord of its day. The interior was nice and the back seats folded down to expand the trunk area. It was sporty-looking, with dual exhaust and a floor shifter. It ended up in my shop because, as was often the case, the transmission failed with 86,000 miles on it. The Taurus series always had an unacceptably high rate of tranny failures (including our editor’s, which ended up being the killing blow that drove him into a Prius). Now the new transmission in my ’96 is a good performer, not the hopeless slushbox of the early Tauruses. It just needed improvements to its longevity: better metals, better parts, and a bigger cooler. Suppose every Taurus from ’96 up had carried the Duratec V-6 and the trans had been improved. Then we would be talking about the next generation of the best-selling car in America instead of closing the line.

This is a pattern for Ford. The once best-selling small truck, the Ranger, carried the same base engine for almost 20 years that was introduced in 1974 in the Pinto model. It wasn’t a bad engine and they did eventually upsize it from 2.3 to 2.5, but still, there shouldn’t be a 20-year life cycle for at best a mediocre engine. It seemed in the Nineties every company or contractor had a couple of plain white Rangers. I know there’s not a tremendous profit in base model four-cylinder trucks but there must be something to them because, hey, Toyota sells a lot of them now.

Why or why not

Ford was left in the blessed position of having the only full-size rear-wheel-drive platform available on the Crown Victoria model. The redesigned model of the early Nineties with the 4.6-liter overhead-cam V-8 was a real winner. But I have often wondered why Ford never took the next step and offered it with independent rear suspension. I know they have the capability because my ’95 Mercury Cougar, which is for all practical purposes a full-size rear-wheel-drive car with a 4.6-liter V-8, had independent rear suspension and it made a big difference in the handling. If I am wrong please correct me but every Crown Vic, Grand Marquis, or Lincoln Town Car I have ever worked on had a solid-tube rear axle assembly which does not allow the rear wheels to move independently of each other, hindering both handling and ride quality.

The pattern at Ford seems clear. Develop a good model and then refuse to substantially improve it until the competition buries you. Then kill the model and start anew. This worked for Henry. His revolutionary Model T put America on wheels with the most widely sold car in history. But by the early 1920s, just having a car that ran and was cheap was no longer enough, and his car was made obsolete.

But Henry stubbornly clung to it, unrepentant and unimproved. The net result was General Motors became the biggest car seller and Ford, on the verge of failure, closed his plants, extorted survival money from his dealer network, and developed the Model A, another spectacular breakthrough. Of course he could have just developed the Model A four years earlier and prevented GM from taking the number one spot (which Ford never regained) but that wasn’t Henry’s way.

Perhaps every great man has a great folly, and every great company has to surmount a great loss. With so many losses, Ford — the man and the institution — must have been very great indeed.

Doug Flint owns and operates Tune-Up Technology, a garage in Alexandria, Va.