Ford: A look at how the company changed roads and mass production techniques

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Did the Indian consumer fail Ford Motors or did Ford Motors fail the Indian consumer? Or, did the iconic company fail itself? There can be endless debates, but the moot point remains that with the exit of Ford, a significant label – perhaps the most heritage-laden one in history – has left the country. The market is a cruel, no-nonsense place that sets no great store by heritage or history. However, automobile history will reserve an eloquent chapter for Ford Motors and it makes interesting reading for anyone with or without a vehicle of his own.

It is no exaggeration to say that the world would have been different had Henry Ford not set up his company in 1903 in the US and turn it into a country on the wheels of freedom. Rarely has an industry been so fundamentally influenced by the success of one brand as Ford’s Model T did.

Not the oldest

Ford is not the world’s oldest automobile brand. There are more than half-a-dozen of them still doing business and successfully in different continents. These are names that evoke veneration and prompt millions of people to loosen their purse strings faster. But very few can claim as many pages in history as this company with the blue oval logo can.

If not for anything else Ford will be remembered for dramatically reducing the cost of a car in the first decade of the last century by introducing mass production. Though Henry Ford (1863-1947) built a car as experiment at a spot adjoining his home in 1896, he set up his company in 1903 from where Model A, the first car, rolled out in July that year.

Aspiration

However, the launch of Model T changed the course of automobile history by bringing vehicles within the aspiration range of the common man in the US. It was launched in 1908, a year when everything that happened was “bigger, better, faster and stranger”.

With his vision fixed on the emerging consumerism, Ford began mass production of Model T that was a hit as soon as it was rolled out. In 1911, the year when India shifted the national capital from Calcutta to Delhi, Henry Ford set up his assembly plant in Kansas and the first overseas plant in England’s Manchester. Just two years later he unveiled the first moving assembly line of production.

Cost barriers smashed

This virtually led to a revolution in automobile pricing with the average cost of a Model T from $850 in 1908 to below $300 in 1925. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, while the cost of the Model T was worth 18 months’ salary of an average worker in 1908, in 1925 an average worker could buy the car with his salary for four months. The car was simple to drive and cheap to repair — the USP that along with the crashing price fuelled the common man’s desire.

Ford’s revolution perhaps benefitted the workers more. To produce more vehicles, he needed higher productivity and in order to ensure it, Ford introduced a wage of $5 for an eight-hour shift, a sharp deviation from the norm of $2.34 for nine hours of work.

The outcome of Ford’s vision was a virtual transformation of the roads in the US. By 1914, as many as 5 lakh Model Ts were running and by 1923, the company produced more than 50% of the cars in the US.

Though the car was available in other colours such as red, most of the vehicles were shiny black for which Henry Ford had a personal fascination.

The last Model T was produced in 1927 not because demand died down for the machine, but because Ford was not content to rest on his laurels and began to develop other models to turn on the appetite of the market. When production was halted 15,007,034 Model Ts were produced.

Even in the 1920s Ford had set up more than 20 assembly plants in different continents exporting the American dream. It needs no emphasis that all the boardrooms that plan and execute strategy to produce a people’s car are indebted to the original dreamer.

About three decades after the first Model T rolled out, on the other side of the Atlantic, Adolf Hitler hit upon the plan of putting a car in every German home and, along with Ferdinand Porsche, conceptualised the KDF-Wagen which was the precursor to the best-selling Beetle. The German dictator laid the foundation stone of the KDF-Wagen factory in 1938.

Ironically, the Beetle eventually outnumbered Model T in 1972. However, it is difficult to compare production and consumption figures that are five decades apart.

If you want to have a look at Model T vehicles, do visit vintage car rallies that take place in some Indian cities. There are proud Model T owners who have kept their cars in shining condition and ride them proudly in these rallies. However, none of them carry the blue oval logo that was developed later.

Matter of faith

Interestingly, the Ford family has left their signature on a landmark in West Bengal. About 130 km to the north of Kolkata where two rivers the Jalangi and the Hooghly meet in Nabadwip where Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was born more than 500 years ago, Alfred Ford, the great grandson of Henry Ford, donated $30 million towards building a temple ISKCON (International Society of Krishna Consciousness).

 “Srila Prabhupada envisioned this temple. I am happy to contribute to this dream project. This is going to be for people. This will make people from all over the world visit Mayapur, the birthplace of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu,” Alfred Ford said earlier. He was the chairman of the temple that has occupies over 425,000 sq ft and is 300 metres in height with its blue dome, made with Bolivian marble, dominating the skyline journey of Mayapur.

Construction of the temple that can accommodate more than 10,000 devotees simultaneously, is expected to be complete in 2022.

Ford’s association with ISKCON started in 1974 when he met the founder of the community AC Bhaktivedanta in Dallas.