The most controversial Fords ever sold

Slide of There are many kinds of controversy, and a car manufacturer which has been operating for 120 years, as Ford Motor Company has, will inevitably have experienced most of them. Here are 40 examples of the company’s models which have caused disputes of one kind or another. They’re listed in chronological order, and were marketed either by Ford itself or by brands Ford owned before 1950, but not ones it acquired after that year. Slide of Ford Model T (1908) The Model T is now perhaps the most celebrated car Ford ever produced, but to get the full picture we have to consider how cars in general were viewed when it first appeared in 1908. Although they developed an enthusiastic following, they were also considered by many people to be noisy, smelly, frighteningly fast and terribly dangerous. The T wasn’t necessarily a specific target, but by its very existence it was part of a large controversy, and became central to it as sales skyrocketed. Henry Ford was however criticised for hanging onto it for too long, as it stayed in production for 19 years, and during the latter half of its life General Motors overtook Ford in the US market. Slide of Lincoln Zephyr (1936) The Zephyr was a remarkable car for 1936, not least because it had – remarkably for its relatively low price – a V12 engine related to (but not simply an enlarged version of) the Ford flathead V8. The V12 was the car’s most appealing, but also most controversial, feature. Its most serious flaw was that the exhaust gases were ported through the cylinder blocks, and heated up the water which the radiator was trying to cool down. Lincoln later made amends, but the Zephyr never quite lost its reputation for unreliability. Slide of Ford Parklane (1955) Sometimes a controversy can arise between a manufacturer and its customers. This was the case with the Parklane, a two-door station wagon which sold so poorly that Ford offered it only in the 1956 model year. Ford tried again with the very similar Del Rio, which was more successful in the limited sense that it lasted for two whole model years (1957 and 1958) before being canned. Slide of Ford Taunus (1957) The P2 generation Taunus, sold from 1957 to 1960, must have come as quite a shock to people who had been accustomed to earlier German Fords of the same name. While the previous models appeared relatively staid, this one had lots of chrome, prominent tailfins, a frontal resemblance to the contemporary Mercury Monterey and in some cases two-tone paintwork, the different colours appearing above and below a line which resembled Buick’s ‘sweepspear’. All this flamboyance led to the P2 being nicknamed Barocktaunus, or baroque Taunus, in reference to a highly decorative artistic style of the 17th and 18th centuries. More positively, it was also known as the fliegende Teppich, or flying carpet, in a tribute to its excellent ride quality. Slide of Edsel (1958) Possible reasons for the failure of Ford’s calamitous Edsel brand, which was introduced in 1958 and axed just two years later, include incoherent marketing, a change in customer preferences towards smaller cars, low quality, dubious styling and a horrendous recession in America which saw new car sales halve. Nearly 70 years later, the exact cause no longer matters. What does matter is that Edsel was Ford’s first major disaster, and a sign that even an enormously wealthy company with talented staff can sometimes get things very badly wrong. Slide of Ford Anglia (1959) The last of many European Fords to bear the Anglia name is probably best known now for its appearance in the Harry Potter films, though it’s also notable for being the first car fitted with an engine from the Kent family. Its most controversial feature, which applied only to the saloon versions, was a reverse-angled rear window, which one authority has described as being given “short shrift by customers who could see no rationale for it beyond a perverse desire to be different”. That might well have been the case when the Anglia was launched in 1959, but in the following eight years Ford had reason to build more than a million examples, so the car’s other qualities seem to have overcome early distaste for its unusual appearance. Slide of Ford Taunus (1960) The appearance of the P3 Taunus was approximately as controversial as that of the ‘baroque’ model it replaced in 1960, but for completely different reasons. American influence had been eliminated, and the car’s shape was so unusual for the period that it became known as the Badewanne, or ‘bathtub’. Even more remarkably, the P3 had lozenge-shaped headlights. These would have had to be replaced if the car had been exported to the US, since it was illegal to use anything other than round headlights there at the time. Slide of Ford Consul Classic (1961) While Ford of Germany was removing American influence from the Taunus