It turns out Ford's Fox body was almost its first global platform

All images courtesy of Ford, unless otherwise noted.

1973 marked a major turning point in the auto industry. It was a year marred by an unprecedented oil crisis that forced Americans to rethink their definition of a car. Automakers were implementing drastic changes as executives worried about the cost of meeting rumored fuel economy standards that were to be enforced nationally. Fuel prices were going up, shortages were increasingly common, and motorists were flocking to smaller vehicles. It’s in this grim context that Ford started developing the Fox platform.

The events of 1973 didn’t fully take Ford by surprise. Documents published internally in 1977 explain its executives noticed “spot shortages of gasoline,” both by oil company and by area, as early as 1972. It made two significant decisions that year: It formed a small, management-level committee to discuss what a worldwide fuel shortage would mean for its business, and it created its Product Planning and Research (PPR) division, which was tasked with mapping out Ford’s long-term global product range.

One of PPR’s first conclusions was that Ford had far too many models in its global portfolio. It had spent decades giving divisions in Germany, England, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere the freedom to develop their own cars, even if they overlapped. Executives approved this approach because meeting customer (rather than government) demands was the main consideration in marketing and product-planning decisions. Its global range of about 75 models became unsustainably large when the need to save money was moved up to the first order of business. Ford knew meeting emissions and fuel economy standards globally would eat up a significant amount of its resources. (In an odd twist of fate, automakers in Europe spent the second half of the 2010s looking at the same turbulent horizon.)

 

Ford confirmed the name Fox first appeared in a two-page budget request written in February 1973, so it wasn’t inspired by (or stolen from) the the Audi it shared its name with. Its authors asked for funding to develop “a new corporate worldwide sport/family 4/5 passenger sedan, with optimization of interchangeability and commonality as well as achieving some flexibility for model and style differentiation.” The request proves the Fox was envisioned as a global platform from the get-go.

 

 

An early design study for the Fox body.

An early design study for the Fox body.

 

 

Ford president Lee Iacocca approved it with the consideration that several cars in the company’s line-up needed to be replaced by 1980, and work started quickly. “By March of 1973, we were working on developing both a front-wheel drive and a rear-wheel drive car, and on the possibility of a rotary engine application. All of them were Pinto- or Taunus-sized cars. The rotary engine was killed off early because of its fuel economy disadvantage,” remembered James Bruin, a principal staff engineer in product planning.

 

One Ford’s stillborn predecessor

 

John W. Risk, the Fox’s director of product planning, outlined three cars all lumped under the Fox umbrella. Engineers envisioned them as replacements for the the Pinto, the the Mustang II, and the the Maverick, respectively. He explained that developing the former was the most important priority for several reasons. First, the Pinto was launched in 1970, so it would show its age before the Mustang. Second, its successor would have either directly spawned or strongly influenced the sedan designed to replace the Cortina sold in Europe, which was also launched in 1970. Third, due to the model’s global aspirations, it needed to deliver good fuel economy, and the Pinto was Ford’s gas mileage champ at the time. Risk wrote “a 100-inch wheelbase car that could replace both models and give high gas mileage seemed advisable.”

 

 

Ford Fairmont wagon prototypes.

 

 

By the end of 1973, PPR sketched the outline of a modular platform with either a 100- or 105-inch wheelbase. The latter configuration later underpinned the Fairmont, the car that inaugurated the Fox platform. The idea was that once they had chosen a wheelbase, engineers could save a tremendous amount of time and money by easily modifying the front and rear ends and the greenhouse to suit a specific project’s needs. It made perfect sense. Ford published a paper named Fox Advanced Pre-Program Report in December 1974 that predicted the Fox project would reduce the unique assembly parts in the Pinto/Bobcat, the Mustang, and the Maverick/Comet by about 1,150.

 

Documents buried in Ford’s archives department and kindly shared with Hemmings shed light on some of the additional savings PPR planned to achieve by making the Fox platform a one-size-fits-all solution. In 1975, the Product Planning Committee wrote that the architecture would allow Ford to reduce the number of models it sold in the United States from 64 to 42. Looking beyond America’s borders, it was seen as the potential foundation to replace the Taunus/Cortina, the Capri, the Corcel, the Consul/Granada, Brazil’s Maverick, Argentina’s Falcon and Fairlane, and even Australia’s beloved Falcon. Achieving this level of flexibility in the 1970s would have stretched the industry’s technological frontiers.

 

 

Fox body development.

 

 

Ford could have pulled it off, too, but it ultimately axed the project. Costs associated with packaging constraints convinced it to develop the Fox platform primarily with the American market in mind.

 

“North American Automotive Operations eventually decided the plan was impractical from both a financial and planning viewpoint. For one thing, there was the problem of decking. Europeans put their engines in from the bottom of the car, and we drop ours in from the top. Each car’s basic design is influenced greatly by the decking used. And, to convert all Ford plants to either top- or bottom-decking uniformly would have cost much more than the world-car commonality was worth to the company,” Risk remembered.

 

Government regulations added a layer of complexity to his team’s project. “Another problem was the great variation in government standards for cars from one country to another. Any world car would have had to carry much more extra equipment than it needed to pass the various requirements from one country to another. Some of the international requirements are even mutually exclusive,” he explained. The second strike against the platform was its last, and the Fox platform lost its international approach in 1975. From that point on, America was its main target.

Europe’s mark on the Fox

 

Development work continued without the need to Europeanize the Fox, but the men and women working it nonetheless looked across the pond for inspiration when needed. Turin-based design house Ghia, which Ford purchased from De Tomaso in 1970, contributed design proposals to the project on a regular basis. It notably participated in styling the aforementioned Fairmont and Mercury’s variant of the car, the Zephyr. None of its designs were adopted, but Ghia said it influenced Ford’s designers.

 

 

Ghia's early Fox body design study, also seen at the top of the story.

Ghia's early Fox body design study, also seen at the top of the story.

Ghia's early Fox body design study, also seen at the top of the story.

 

 

“Whether a car ends up looking exactly like one of our submissions is irrelevant,” affirmed Ghia president Don De La Rossa in 1977. “There has never been a Ford model that was completely Ghia—nor do I expect there to be. We are not in business to compete with Ford’s U.S. designers. Our job is to contribute ideas, and to give management a chance to see how a given program would be approached by a group that is fairly far removed from the influence of the United States,” he added.

 

Finishing what the Fox started

 

 

Ford shifted its attention away from global standardization during the 1980s, and it continued to give different markets the cars local motorists were asking for. Although it’s easy to argue executives had a blinkered world view, that’s far from the truth. It wasn’t the most cost-effective approach, but it made sense and it often paid off. America got pickup trucks, a country-specific Escort, and the original Taurus, for example. Europe received its own Escort and a hugely popular Fiesta tailored to its roads. Australia continued developing the rear-wheel drive Falcon, which was offered as a sedan, a wagon, a van, and a Ranchero-like ute. Instead of sourcing products from Dearborn, Ford’s Brazilian and Argentinian divisions preferred joining forces with Volkswagen’s to create a business named Autolatina in 1987.

 

 

Allowing different divisions to take all-you-can-eat turns at the budget table was called into question again during the 2000s. Alan Mulally, the former Boeing executive who joined Ford as president and CEO in 2006, implemented a plan called One Ford which he celebrated as a way to slash costs, reduce complexity, and increase profits. These were the same basic advantages Risk’s team hoped to achieve with the Fox platform. Implementing the plan remained difficult, but this time Ford didn’t have a choice.

 

SOURCE: HEMMINGS