Thanks for reviving the thread. I have always wondered why Ford’s dream (a completely integrated car manufacturing company)…didn’t work out.
At one point, Ford owned iron mines, steel mills, copper wire plants, and a glass plant. He even attempted to get into the raw rubber business (Fordlandia/Brazil-which failed).
Why doesn’t a highly integrated business not work out?
I have no cites, but I imagine it’s because of Henry Ford’s primary logical blind spot: Just because you’ve figured out how to do one thing well does not mean that experience will translate to other things. If you’re better at running a car company than anyone else, it does not mean you’re better at running a rubber company than anyone else, or that your company can do the R+D required to keep ahead of your competitors in that industry.
Because companies that specialize typically outperform companies that generalize. Why do you need to own a copper mine when you can buy your copper from whoever is selling it the cheapest? Why make copper into copper wire when you can just buy copper wire from whoever is selling it the cheapest? Why make copper wire into generators when you can just buy generators from whoever is selling it the cheapest?
Unless every part of the integrated company can produce their component for cheaper than it can be bought, the integrated company is at a disadvantage. For some things, having control over the extraction and manufacturing of a critical component makes the extra cost worthwhile. For most things, it doesn’t.
Well, be that as it may, the OP’s claim that Ford made the first mass-produced V8 is still wrong.
The V8 was only a “luxury” because earlier luxury cars had come with higher-powered V8’s. Ford had spent the last decade warning his customers not to be fooled by the two extra cylinders on all the six-cylinder cars being sold by his rivals, but then turned around and one upped them with the V8, even though it was pretty much the same as a straight 6, performance wise.
The Dust Bowl outlaws liked the Ford V8 because they were reasonably fast, but more importantly were ubiquitous and easy to steal. That was more or less the appeal to early stock car drivers too-- there were faster and better engines out there, but Ford V8’s were everywhere and could be bought for next to nothing.
The thing is that like the Model T, the Ford V8 was pretty much in line with everything else on the market when introduced, but then they kept selling the things for two decades with only minor improvements. The pent up demand for new cars immediately after the war meant they could get away with selling them at first, but by the late 40’s and early 50’s when they finally retired it, the flathead V8 was spectacularly obsolete.
:mad: Do not blaspheme Our Ford! (BTW, who are these “Jews”? 
Some tribe on a Savage Reservation?)
More than that, he fancied himself some kind of social engineer, and tried to hyperpaternalistically micromanage the lives of the workers in his company-towns, which he designed and planned and ruled according to his own social ideas. (As for unions – can’t very well have the poor misguided things forming their own organizations and messing up his best-laid plans . . .)
Daniel Lazare, in America’s Undeclared War: What’s Killing Our Cities and How We Can Stop It, asserts that commerce/industry was always a secondary consideration to Ford; all the ideas that really drove him were social and political. A private-sector politician.
this is what I was going to say.
He was an economic force who linked up with similar people to create something phenomenal. Like Jobs, he had his faults.
Sure you don’t mean Bill Gates?
Ford was Apple. general Motors is Microsoft.
The early titans of GM, William Durant and Alfred Sloan were opportunists and salesmen. Durant wasn’t an engineer, he couldn’t design or build an automobile. But he could sell like the dickens. He bought up existing companies like Buick, Cadillac and Chevrolet and integrated them into a conglomerate.
Ford wanted to control every point in the manufacturing. he wanted to own the rainforests that grew the rubber plants, the Michigan forests that provided the wood for body frames and the steel that went into the chassis. He bought Lincoln in 1922 with the stated intention of covering the low end and the upper end of the market. But Ford’s real motive was revenge. Lincoln’s founder had pushed Ford out of the auto company that Ford had built before Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford and Ford Motor Company were an intertwined entity and if you didn’t agree with him you could go fuck yourself.
General Motors management preferred a semi-autonomous organization where much of the product was supplied by outside contractors. Sloan took over the company and strived to cover every base from entry-level to limousine. Sloan was well known but had few enemies and glad-handed the politicians to get things done.
The major flaw in this Apple/Ford analogy is that General Motors believed in design and styling. Ford painted most Model-Ts black because it was cheap and dried faster on the assembly line. Ford Motor company paid little attention to styling until Henry’s son Edsel was able to exert an influence in the late Thirties.
Mass production isn’t the best choice of words for the OP’s statement, maybe “available to the the masses” is better. In 1932, something like 3/4 of all automobiles in the United States were Fords. Chevrolet first outsold Ford in 1928 and they swapped places several times until 1936. Chevrolet essentially held that position for the next fifty years.
Others may have been mass producing V8 engines, but their cars cost much more and their numbers were far below what Chevrolet and Ford were pumping out. Although Chevrolet’s six cylinder was only five horsepower less, that was an eight percent boost. Luxury cars had an opposed engine because the design is much smoother and pleasant sounding. They’re also more compact than an inline engine, allowing for more room for other concerns. The difference in driving sensations between a V8 and a straight six is enormous. And General Motors couldn’t make an engine that good, that cheaply, for another twenty-three years.
When they did, they crushed Ford. Just as the Model T hadn’t keep up with the times, neither had the flathead Ford V8.
On the scale of mass production, there was a wide void between ‘a couple of other companies had been selling V-8 engines for years’ and ‘Ford is selling V-8 engines’. Ferrari sells a V12 engine in some of their cars now. If every Asian manufacturer decided to do it tomorrow, the impact would be similar. Even today, you can talk about innovations that other manufacturers have made, but in the US it’s only Toyota, Ford and Chevrolet that really count.
There are faster and better engines than the modern small block Chevrolet, but that engine owns the market because like the flathead, it’s cheap and a massive percentage of the performance aftermarket is devoted to it. But if Ford had not virtually invented the idea of the hot rod, a car that could be cheaply modified with near universal parts, the small block Chevrolet may never have been able to attain that position.
I concede your point that the Ford V* technically was not the first mass produced V8 engine, but believe that the OP was clumsily trying to make a different point. The introduction of the V8 Ford was HUGE in the evolution of the automobile in America.
You are right about this-when Ford made his attempt to grow rubber trees in the Amazon, he tried to make his Brazilian workers into Americans-even forcing them to live like workers in Michigan. Ford refused to allow “his” workers to have access to dance halls and bars-which is something all Brazilians love. Finally, he gave in and allowed a satellite town to spring up-which had all the vices.
He also exhibited curious ignorance-Brazil had many university trained botanists/crop scientists who could have advised him on rubber culture-instead he relied on guys from Michigan-who knew nothing about the local conditions. He even tried to plant apple orchards in the place-the trees all died.
Those luxury car V8’s were much more powerful though. What Ford brought to the masses was an engine that outwardly resembled a luxury car engine but performed exactly the same as an economy car engine.
Um, actually there is absolutely no difference in driving sensation between a V8 and straight 6 of equal displacement and outputs. And GM did make an engine as good and cheap as the Ford V8-- it was called the stovebolt 6-cylinder. It’s overhead-valve design WAS an innovation in the cheap-car market, and it consistently produced roughly the same power as the Ford V8, but with smaller displacement and better fuel economy. Plymouth also had a straight 6 that, depending on the year, performed about as well or better than the V8.
Again, there was no real performance difference. It would be like if Toyota put a V12 in the next Corolla, but it was a 2.5L V12 that made 150HP. Maybe people would think it was cool having a V12, but those extra cylinders are just extra spark plugs to change.
The point the OP was trying to make was that Ford was on the cutting edge of automotive technology, which is wrong. He was a genius in the realms of production, distribution and marketing, but under Henry’s watch Ford never sold anything that was particularly innovative on its own merits. That marketing genius is what’s on show with the Ford V8-- Ford somehow convinced people that there was something superior about that engine configuration when really there wasn’t.
Actually, Ford didn’t go public until 1956. Probably a typo, but worth correcting.
Ford should have retired in 1918. Tragically, he didn’t. He almost destroyed his company, he did destroy his son.
When Henry Ford II was yanked out of the Navy in 1943 it was a last-ditch effort by the government to privately save FMC before they had to nationalize it. In that year, Ford was losing $10,000,000 per month, which adjusts for inflation at an incredible $125,000,000 per month. Things were such a mess that the late-30s, early-40s Ford Motor Company paid its bills by weighing them!
You cannot make this shit up.
His treatment of Edsel, a fine automotive executive with far, far better styling taste than his dad (Edsel created what many consider to be the first “hot rod”, and was responsible for the look of the Model A), could be called, at best, cruel, and ended up contributing to Edsel’s death. Edsel contracted stomach cancer and Henry browbeat the man to shun medical advice and to drink unpastuerized milk, which directly lead to Edsel’s early death in 1943 of undulent fever (Brucellosis).