Quote:
Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard
What lessons do you draw from the design of the Model T and Ford the company?
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The Model T didn't add anything great to the design of the car at the time - no major new technology, nothing particularly special or unusual about the engineering except the odd pedal arrangement. By unusual for the time I mean most cars were different in one way or another as makers were experimenting a lot.
What it did do was simplify it all by using standard parts across different models making them cheap to make and fix. By being so cheap it also introduced "not very wealthy" people to the idea of car ownership. The technology to do that started a trend - here in the UK William Morris imported a lot of machinery developed to produce cars by Ford and his competitors - this allowed Morris to cut his prices several times in the 1920s which eventually allowed him to overtake Ford to be No.1 in the UK market.
As for the company, in the earlier years by all accounts it was very conservative keeping the T in production for perhaps longer than it should and piling a lot of pressure onto it's successor (the Model A ?). Maybe this was down to Henry himself maybe not. Some of the more radical moves such as overseas plants seemed to be guided more by outside investors (e.g. Trafford Park in Manchester) or by Henry's children (Dagenham).
Also I wonder if projects like the DFV and F1, the Mustang, world cars would have been done with Henry guiding things.