Midterm BOC: Ford

Ford Motor Company was started in 1903 by Henry Ford at age 40 in Detroit Michigan.  It was one of the only companies to survive the great depression of the 1930’s.  Henry Ford is most known for being the first company to start a car assembly line.  Their first car was and still is a famous called the model A that sold for $2000.  Ford has been one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world.  They are also the biggest family ran company in the world.  In 1917, “Ford begins offering $5 per day for eight-hour work days and 15,000 job seekers clamor for 3,000 jobs at the Model T Plant in Highland Park. The previous pay rate was $2.34 per day for nine hours.” 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5168769.  This happens right after Ford passed Olds and Buick in sales and that was just unheard off at the time.  In 1922 Ford bought Lincoln it was a way for them to compete against giant Cadillac.  It was a way for Ford to sell cars not to just the working class, but the wealthy as well.   The next biggest thing that happens to Ford was in 1963 when they realized that they needed a new kind of car that was cheap and fun to drive.  At the time Ford had a car called the Falcon.  It was a four door small car that many people could afford.  Ford decided to make it smaller and get rid of two doors and call it a Mustang. “To make the Mustang affordable it needed to share much of its engineering with an existing Ford product. That product was the smallest Ford of the time, the compact Falcon. In fact, the first Mustangs were built in the same Dearborn, Mich., plant as the Falcon.” http://www.edmunds.com/ford/mustang/history.html.  

The thing that many people don’t know is that the Falcon and the Mustang had the same exact frame and all the same parts just a different name and top body.  The Mustang blew up and has become one of America’s best selling cars since the 1960’s.  The next big move was in 1986 when Ford started to pursuer Austin Martin. 

             “Then in 1986 Ford bought 75% of the company and the future of Aston Martin started to look a bit more promising. In 1993 Ford finally bought the rest of the company from Victo Gauntlett and took over complete control of the operations. http://www.amlvantage.com/history.shtml.  

Ford sold their Tractor line to Fiat to be able to purchase British monster Austin Martin.  Ford biggest competitor in the US is Dodge and Chevy.  But they compete all over the world.  The car industry is just too big anymore to only have one competitor; you have to be able to compete all over the world.