1928-1934: From A to B

Aggressive restructuring was only half the problem hitting Australia's Ford dealers in the mid-1920s. The real issue was much more basic, and was punishing Ford in every market simultaneously – the Model T simply wasn't the hot-ticket item anymore.

Sales brochure image of the '32 cabriolet. Actually from Ford of Britain, but it was too good an image not to use. (Source: Classic Car Catalogue)

Henry's Lady
Back in the U.S., the author of all Ford's pain was our old friend, Alfred P. Sloan, head of General Motors. He was one of the first industry leaders to realise there was a kind of "saturation point" looming. Henry Ford might've cooked up the perfect package for early adopters, but what would happen once everybody who wanted a car already had one, and any further sales could only be had by tempting existing customers back to the market? Why should anyone who'd owned a Model T for perhaps ten years, Sloan reasoned, be happy to trade it in for a replacement that was virtually identical in every respect? No, to sell new cars to people who already had one, you had to redefine "new" as "better". It was this approach he would go on to outline in his famous 1940 Product Policy, summed up by the immortal phrase, "A car for every purse and purpose."

We want to make you dissatisfied with your current car so you will buy a new one – you who can afford it … And you who can afford it perform – probably unconsciously – a very important economic service. You pass on to the used-car market your old car at a value in transportation with which no new car could possibly compete.

To this end, in 1927 Sloan appointed Harley Earl head of a new "Art & Color" division – what we'd now call the styling department – then reshuffled the GM company hierarchy in line with his new philosophy, inventing the Pontiac brand out of whole cloth to be a next step up from Chevrolet.

The plan was to keep customers moving up the ladder to ever more expensive and prestigious brands. In theory, a young blue-collar factory worker would start off buying an entry-level Chevrolet, but if they worked hard and one day got promoted, they'd take some of that extra pay and upgrade to a new Pontiac. In a few more years, they might trade up to a middle-aged person's car, like an Oldsmobile or Buick. It would keep going like this until the buyer was greying at the temples and their years of experience made them a quality control officer at the factory (and a respected figure in the union), by which point they should be tooling around in a big, luxury Cadillac. Today this strategy is unsurprisingly called Sloanism, and Henry Ford was so unprepared for it that his company would still be trying to respond on the notorious "E Day", 4 September 1957. The quarter-billion dollar debacle of the Edsel would come about largely because Ford was still grasping around for a way out of grooming customers for GM.

1928 Model A Phaeton, built in Geelong by Ford Australia. This one was actually for sale at the time the image was posted; I wonder what it went for? (Source: Facebook)

With Model T sales at last in sharp decline, in 1926 Henry Ford and his son Edsel went back to the drawing board and, in great secrecy, got busy designing "the New Car". It featured an upgraded 3.3-litre engine capable of 40bhp (30 kW, or double the Model T's output), and three gears instead of two, meaning it could reach speeds in excess of 100km/h. It was also the first Ford to use what we now consider "standard" driver controls, as pioneered by the 1916 Cadillac Type 53 and popularised by the Austin 7 of 1923.

As a sign Ford really was starting over, Henry rebooted his designation system and dubbed his new creation the Model A, later more affectionately known as Henry's Lady . It was unveiled to the U.S. public on 2 December 1927, and by the end of that week, an astonishing one in every four Americans had viewed the display. Initially it was priced at only $500 ($9,200 in 2024 USD), so by February 1929 a million of them had been sold – a figure that became 2 million by July that same year. By March 1930, 3 million had left the factories, and by the time production shut down in March 1932, the build total had capped out at a respectable 4.8 million.

Even so, by Ford's standards the car was something of a flop. Under Sloan's leadership, General Motors had offered early Model T buyers something they'd never had before: A choice. For only a little more money than a new Model A, customers could upgrade to the latest-model Chevrolet instead – or, if they preferred, they could get a second-hand Chevy for the same price as the Ford, or even at a slight discount. As a result, where Ford managed 1.5 million sales in 1929, GM managed 1.7 million with their top three brands alone. The Ford Motor Company was wrongfooted badly, and Henry's years of greatness were already behind him, leaving him to indulge in weird projects like Fordlandia, printing hundreds of copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to distribute to other industry leaders, and accepting an award from Nazi officials who wished to thank him for supporting the Reich.¹

One of Ford Australia's ads for the Model A, c. 1928 (Source: Reddit)

It took another five months for the Model A to reach Australia, showing up in all the capital cities on 15 May 1928. Within four days, more than 300,000 people had visited the displays – almost one in every twenty Australians at that time. To accommodate the Model A, new presses at been installed at Norlane, allowing for an extra three inches of interior space as had been requested by Australian buyers. In the end, 32,387 Model As were assembled at Norlane between 1928 and 1932, but their best market penetration in the first year was only about 20 percent, compared to 34 percent for GM.

In addition, the changeover was the final straw for the old distributor network. To tide them over while the factories in Detroit and Windsor retooled for the new model, Ford made a huge final batch of Model Ts and sent them out to the dealers – who were expected to accept and pay for them up front. Those who didn't usually lost their franchise, and given many of them were already under financial strain after the takeover by Hubert French, it wasn't unusual to see once-thriving Ford distributors wound up around this time.

Plan B
It will not shock you to learn Ford followed up the Model A with the Model B, yet another increment on the Model T theme. It came in two trim levels (Standard and Deluxe) and a number of body styles, with prices starting at just $490 for the coupé (almost $11,300 in 2024) up to $650 ($15,000) for a convertible sedan. The engine was yet another iteration of the same four-cylinder unit that had powered the Model T (albeit with tweaks to the balancing and lube system), which was both good and bad. On the upside, that meant servicing and maintenance was easy, and spares were already available everywhere: On the other hand, it meant the B was immediately upstaged by its own stablemate, the Model 18.

Flathead V8, appropriately enough from what seems to be the Canadian brochure, year unknown (Source: Curbside Classic)

The Model 18 hit the market on 25 August 1932, just months after the opening of Sydney Harbour Bridge. It was mechanically identical to the Model B, except for one notable exception – this was the first affordable, mass-market car to feature a V8 engine.² The advertising slogan was, "65 horsepower – 65 miles an hour", and owners soon found it was no exaggeration. With a dizzying 48 kW available at 3,400rpm, the 3.6-litre side-valve V8 was such a success that by 1935 it was the only engine Ford's American factories were producing. Only two factories in the world were capable of producing the so-called "flathead" V8: The Windsor plant built to replace the old Walkerville Wagon Works in Windsor, Ontario; and the enormous new River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Both were also capable of building four-cylinder engines, but Windsor only ever dispatched V8s to its Australian subsidiary. Fours earmarked for Australia all came from U.K., from Ford of Britain's Dagenham plant located on the Thames, just east of London.³

Since Norlane had now gained its own tool shop, these engines were fitted to chassis components also sourced from Canada. Major pressings such as the firewall, mudguards, running boards and bonnet were stamped out at Windsor, whereas lesser items like body panels, doors, interior trim, glass, battery, tyres and paint were all sourced locally. By this time, the Australian content of Ford's vehicles was approaching 75 percent.

Local pricing was varied. A rumble-seat "Sport Coupe" started at £327 ($38,800 in 2023), with the ragtop Roadster and Sport Phaeton models each going for £333 pounds ($39,500). The ultra-luxurious Town Car however cost a whopping £406 ($48,100), so it's no surprise it was a sales failure. Between the price, the economic times and the fact that no-one on the prowl for a luxury car ever visited a Ford dealership, only 1,200 Town Cars were ever sold in the U.S., never mind here. In tiny Australia, roughly 2,100 passenger cars left the line at Norlane between August 1932 and July 1933, of which 1,695 appear to have been V8s – figures which are remarkably close to Holden's around this time. But their crowning achievement came with Lewis Bandt's innovation on the Model B, the "coupé utility" – Australia's first ute. 

The story has been told many times, but according to an interview five decades later, the idea had come from a letter that crossed managing director Hubert French's desk. It had been written by a Gippsland farmer's wife, and she'd had enough of riding to church in their open-sided farm truck and arriving with her Sunday best soaked in mud. This being the dark heart of the Depression, credit had tightened in recent years and bank managers would lend a farmer money to buy farming equipment, but not a passenger car.

Her letter said, "Why don't you build people like us a vehicle to to go church in on a Sunday and which can carry our pigs to market on Mondays?"

The letter arrived on the desk of managing director Hubert French who, rather than dropping it in the round filing cabinet, passed it on to sales manager Scott Inglis instead. He in turn showed it to plant superintendent Slim Westman, who passed it to company's newly-formed Design Group. In 1934, the Design Group consisted of exactly one person, a 22-year-old South Australian named Lewis Thornet Bandt.

Even then he had a reputation as a gifted designer, and Ford had already singled him out for greater things. The concept of taking the front end of one of the new V8 coupés and marrying it to the cargo tray of a lorry had been kicking around for a while – Henry Ford himself is sometimes credited with inventing the pickup as far back as 1912, when he modified a Model T with a cargo box on his own farm – but Bandt was the first to design a vehicle that was actually sound. He began by sketching the vehicle on a ten-metre blackboard, depicting a front view as well as side and rear elevations.

Slim Westman came to me one day and said he wanted the front end of a V8 sedan combined with a utility tray. He said Australian farmers needed a vehicle with more passenger protection and comfort – a vehicle which would give them all the comfort and economy of a family sedan and still have the carrying capacity of a light truck.

The whole thing had already started to germinate. Westman quite rightly reckoned that if we cut down a car and put a tray on the back, the whole thing would tear in half once there was weight in the back.

I told him I would design it with a frame that came from the very back pillar, through to the central pillars, near the doors. I would arrange for another pillar to further strengthen that weak point where the cabin and tray joined. I said to Westman, "Boss, them pigs are going to have a luxury ride around the city of Geelong!"

What made Bandt's design different from American-style pickups was that he'd started with an ordinary passenger car, not a light truck. Your average pickup could be converted back to a cab-chassis simply by unbolting the tray: That couldn't happen with a ute, whose tray was integrated into the body with unique panels. That meant the ute had the comfortable driving experience and all-weather cabin of a car, while also providing a 1.6-metre cargo tray with 545kg load capacity. When the design was seen by Westman some weeks later, he authorised Bandt to build two prototypes.

On first sight of the prototypes, Scott Inglis authorised a startup production run of 500 vehicles. Westman asked for – and got – £10,000 for tooling, and the first coupé utilities rolled off the Norlane assembly line in 1934. Later, two Geelong-built examples were sent to Dearborn for the suits in the U.S. to inspect. Bandt accompanied them on the trip, and recalled:

Mr Ford called in his men from Texas. They took one look and asked, "What's that?" Mr Ford replied: "It's a kangaroo chaser" and told them he was about to build a model there.

Bandt's coupé utility was so good it forced GM-H to follow suit, with utes for both Chevrolet and Bedford on sale later in the year. The humble ute was already on its way to Aussie icon status – and given the state of the economy at the time, that was no bad thing.

¹ Although it must be said James D. Mooney of GM received the same award, and for the same reason. GM owned Opel and built the Nazis their Blitz trucks, after all, and it's rumoured Sloan didn't bother to resign from Opel's board during the war.

² Technically Cadillac had debuted the first mass-produced V8 engine way back in 1914, but that was a far more exclusive and expensive car than the Ford.

³ It was supplemented by the Model Y, also known as the Ford 8 after its piddling 8hp English Sidevalve engine.