I checked out David Crippen’s (1989) oral history of Virgil Exner Jr. to see if he offered any useful factual details about two lingering historical debates — why the Studebaker Lark as well as the […]
Indie Auto reader James E. Duvall recently commented about how the Falcon-based Econoline van and truck had such a front-end weight bias that they could flip on their front end under intense braking unless there […]
Former Ford Motor Company executive Donald Frey explained to David Crippen (1986) why he thought that the automaker’s “cockamamie” decision-making structure led to major quality-control problems with the 1957 Ford. “As it turned out, preceding […]
(EXPANDED FROM 12/29/2023) This is another Indie Auto story that has received a fair amount of blowback. For example, one presumably former reader alleged that I was a “Chevy fanboy” because I called the 1968-70 […]
“. . . We (started facelifting) the ’51, which was a terrible looking spinner job. It had a transparent, plastic spinner inside, and, God, they were terrible looking cars. . . . I remember how that […]
“Fred Hooven was a very good friend of mine and had a much bigger job at Ford than I did. He worked for Mike Ference. Henry Ford asked Ference — this was in 1960. He […]
“[P]robably the guy that was most admired [by Ford Motor Company executive Lewis Crusoe] was [Robert] McNamara. He was a very concise speaker, he was a logician and prided himself that he was. He knew how […]
“I didn’t like his aloof egotism. He’d sit in a meeting and open his briefcase and brush his hair, and he’d dress floozy, you know, and he called us the establishment. He was a queer […]
“What distressed most of us was that we could never be identified as just designers. We were always the ‘la femmes,’ or we were the female designers, and that — we were designers, and men […]
“Our mission with Ben Mills [division general manager] and Will Scott [division plant planner] was to develop a 1958 Lincoln. Then, in that era, bigger is better, longer is better, wider is better, shock the […]
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