Henry Ford: Industry Icon (The good, the bad, and the ugly)
shut down for retooling. The plants were shut down for five months, at an estimated cost of over $250 million. This included an estimated new car sales loss of $42 million profit per month in the five-month shutdown.
Early signs of a need to replace the T were ignored. Henry was in total control of the company, and he refused to accept the end of the T until the changeover to a new model was both too late, and too prohibitively costly to be efficient. In 1921, the T had accounted for over 55 percent of the nation's new car sales. By 1925, the market share was down to 45 percent. In early 1926 it had fallen below 34 percent-the company's lowest market share since 1918. Production problems for the new Model A continued throughout its initial year of production, and 1928 ended with Ford's market share down to just over 15 percent.
With the onset of the Great Depression, Ford Motor Company failed to rebound on the strength of its new model. The car lasted only four years before it, too, was obsolete and in need of replacement. The good times were gone.
While Henry Ford had his limitations and weaknesses, he was not intimidated by failure. His early automotive career was populated by failures, but it was also marked by successes. One of his best quotations is, "Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal."
Although Ford was not the first to do very many things in the automotive industry, there will always be two things he will be remembered for. The Model T and the moving assembly line are fixtures that mark not only the success of an automotive brand, but the success of an entire industry.
His moving assembly line can easily be viewed as perhaps the fulfillment and culmination of the entire Industrial Revolution. And the Model T stands as the assembly line's initial and lasting validation.
© Dan Cooper, 2005
Sources for further reading include some good Internet sites, and some excellent books. The Websites are listed first, followed by the print reading list.
Websites of interest:
The Life of Henry Ford http://www.hfmgv.org/exhibits/hf/ Offers a brief look at the man and his company. The site contains only minor errors in fact, and is otherwise well presented.
A biographical essay http://www.henryford.ws/henry-ford/ An otherwise annoying Website that presents the best Web presence in terms of biographical content on Henry Ford. It is written by
Latest Articles