Why didn't Ford do it THAT way?

NIKwoaC · Apr 25, 2011

Have you ever asked yourself that question? I do all the time.

For example, why didn't Ford put GT40 heads and the cast GT40 intake on the cars from the get-go? There were obviously no real engineering or economic reasons not to, seeing as how the friggin Explorer ended up with those parts.

Was it just because they wanted to reserve those parts for the Cobra?

Anyway, I thought this would spark an interesting conversation on here. Thoughts? There are a few other things I ask myself "why" about, but I thought I'd let you guys fire some off first.

Boss 351 · Apr 25, 2011

Make more money with after-market? Keeping cars in certain classes by not providing too much power???

Why did they keep the 4 lug on there from 79 to 93... no reason for that too, should have updated this in 87 at the very least.

NIKwoaC · Apr 25, 2011

Boss 351 said:
Make more money with after-market? Keeping cars in certain classes by not providing too much power???

Why did they keep the 4 lug on there from 79 to 93... no reason for that too, should have updated this in 87 at the very least.

That's another one of my big ones. Why NOT 5 lug? All the required parts to be 5 lug can be found on other Ford vehicles of the same era, and even on the SVO Mustang. It was obviously doable, why didn't they do it?

wythors · Apr 25, 2011

Cost.

There was a novel written long ago by Arthur Hailey called "Wheels". It is a very interesting behind the scenes story about the automobile industry and addresses these kinds of questions.

Mustang5L5 · Apr 25, 2011

The heads didn't exist until 1992 for production purposes. There is also cost of engine certification.

Why not 5 lugs? Well say 50 cents a lug, times 4 lugs times a million or so cars is a lot of money. Do that for other non-essential areas and stuff adds up.

Ford isn't run by gear heads...it's run by bean counters. Sometimes they let's the engineers play, but only if there is $$$ to be made

stykthyn · Apr 25, 2011

Spoken like a true engineer.

1bad67sbf · Apr 25, 2011

well said on the 4 lug but damn what a PITA they started from it.
mine is, why did ford use a unibody setup? my 67 has alot of rust for me to fix and what a bitch it is to have to do frame and body work as one.

Mustang5L5 · Apr 25, 2011

stykthyn said:
Spoken like a true engineer.

Eh, I deal with it all the time. I make a kick ass product, Put together a costed BOM and next thing I know the marketing people whittle it down to the bare necessities to make their margins better so they get better bonuses. Then I'm left with a crappy product.

Happens in every industry. I'm sure the fox mustang concept had plenty of cool features that never made it off the drawing board due to costs.

1bad67sbf · Apr 25, 2011

that sucks big time but i guess in the end money is money

wythors · Apr 25, 2011

Mustang5L5 said:
Why not 5 lugs? Well say 50 cents a lug, times 4 lugs times a million or so cars is a lot of money. Do that for other non-essential areas and stuff adds up.

This is exactly it. When you're talking hundreds of thousands of units, increasing the cost a nickel is something they're concerned about.

S&B · Apr 25, 2011

Okay but why not a Cup holder you can over engineer me on that one hot shot

bobwb · Apr 25, 2011

thats why we have mustang high perf. shops all over the usa, more jobs.

Cobra912 · Apr 25, 2011

not quite the same thing but today I was doing my tubular k-member and when I took out one of the factory bolts to the local supply shop without looking at it, the sales guy asked me what the heck it came out of.....he had never seen a grade 9.8 bolt before. What? They didn't have grade 10.9 back in 1986?

So I bought my 10.9 bolts that he charged me a billion dollars for and then did a little reading when I got home and find out that:

Grade 8 is what the SAE came out with and grade 10.9 is the metric version or equivalent. Grade 8 min tensile strenght is 150K PSI and 10.9 is 142.2K. Also the torque capacity of the grade 8 is higher then its metric conterpart. That and grade 9.8 is only 9% stronger than SAE J429, grade 5 ASTM A 449

So Ford put in lbarely stronger than grade 5 bolts by using grade 9.8 in k-members? Cheap buggers!!! LOl at least I've never heard of a failed k-member I guess......

Mustang5L5 · Apr 25, 2011

For that location, I don't think you need it. Pretty rugged way it's bolted up.

The suspension bolts are 10.9...and ive busted plenty of sawzall blades just to cut through one!

90mustangGT · Apr 26, 2011

Why not rear disc brakes with 5 lug? Why not a panhard bar in the rear suspension, ect? Well, this sums it up:

wythors said:
Cost.

There was a novel written long ago by Arthur Hailey called "Wheels". It is a very interesting behind the scenes story about the automobile industry and addresses these kinds of questions.

Mustang5L5 said:
The heads didn't exist until 1992 for production purposes. There is also cost of engine certification.

Why not 5 lugs? Well say 50 cents a lug, times 4 lugs times a million or so cars is a lot of money. Do that for other non-essential areas and stuff adds up.

Ford isn't run by gear heads...it's run by bean counters. Sometimes they let's the engineers play, but only if there is $$$ to be made

A lot of other cars are like this and that's why you can't buy the car with the badass engine without paying twice as much for the whole car. They can't just put an powerful motor in there and that's it, everything else has to be upgraded as well. Although it makes sense, Ford is trying to sell cars. Imagine if you could get the M3 engine in the base model BMW 3 series? I bet BMW would sell a lot more cars, but they think this would tarnish their image, and hold themselves at a higher standard. Ford on the other hand, has little shame, they sell cars to make money, they really don't care.

The Foxbody was really designed to be a 4 cylinder car. Really, it's a rear wheel drive Ford Escort. It kind of was their base model 4 cylinder car until the Ford Escort took over that role. Anyways, Ford put a V8 in that badboy and the reason people bought them was for that engine. You could get a V8 car for not much more than a 4 cylinder car. So why in the hell would Ford want to jack up the price anymore than they had to?

srtthis · Apr 26, 2011

Mustang5L5 said:
The heads didn't exist until 1992 for production purposes. There is also cost of engine certification.

Why not 5 lugs? Well say 50 cents a lug, times 4 lugs times a million or so cars is a lot of money. Do that for other non-essential areas and stuff adds up.

Ford isn't run by gear heads...it's run by bean counters. Sometimes they let's the engineers play, but only if there is $$$ to be made

i feel your pain... but ive also had marketing people go the other way trying to add a bunch of useless **** no one wants or needs.

NIKwoaC · Apr 26, 2011

The cost argument seems flawed, particularly for the heads and intake. When it comes right down to it, the GT40 junk is the same as the HO stuff, but with bigger, better ports. If anything, the GT40 stuff might cost less to produce, since there is less material.

I've sometimes wondered if they limited the use of GT40 parts in the 92-95 Mustangs because of their plans to introduce the 4.6L engine in 1996. People groaned and moaned about that 215hp/285ft-lb engine when it came out, imagine how much worse public response would have been if the last of the pushrod engines were in the neighborhood of 235hp/300ft-lb. As an engineer, I understand the cost thing, but I also understand that sometimes you purposely limit the release of the really cool stuff so that your future products have something to look forward to.

The 5 lug thing... Ehhhhh, maybe cost? God, I just have to imagine that with all their other 5 lug cars, it almost had to be easier just to use the tooling for a 5 lug car on the assembly line. I don't know, maybe that was a cost thing. But there again, they went to 5 lug in '94...?

Also curious about the cup holder thing. Were cup holders just not very popular yet in the 80s?

skunk21 · Apr 26, 2011

S&B said:
Okay but why not a Cup holder you can over engineer me on that one hot shot

Back in those days no one really thought or cared about cup holders. alot of the cars back then had crap ones if any designed into them, I don't really remember cup holders in the cars I owned back then we had to use these stupid things...

. For most cars it wasn't until late 90's but mostly on the 2000's when cup holders where all over the place.

wythors · Apr 26, 2011

NikwoaC said:
The cost argument seems flawed, particularly for the heads and intake. When it comes right down to it, the GT40 junk is the same as the HO stuff, but with bigger, better ports. If anything, the GT40 stuff might cost less to produce, since there is less material.

Again, it is cost. The assembly line in Dearborn ran since 1987 using the same parts and the same workers all trained to install those parts. Nothing else ran down that line other than Fox platform vehicles. To start using different cylinder heads, intakes and exhaust manifolds (all stocked in out of state distribution centers for the Explorer program) would have required hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to revamp the parts distribution system, restock the line and retrain the workers. The cars were selling like hotcakes, so where was the need?

NikwoaC said:
The 5 lug thing... Ehhhhh, maybe cost? God, I just have to imagine that with all their other 5 lug cars, it almost had to be easier just to use the tooling for a 5 lug car on the assembly line. I don't know, maybe that was a cost thing. But there again, they went to 5 lug in '94...?

See above. The line was set up to build Fox cars. They have four lugs. Look at some pictures of how they put wheels on cars on a line. They have a giant impact gun on an arm that tightens all the lug nuts at one time. The units used on that line had four fingers. While I'm sure that they can be reconfigured to do five at a time, if the car is selling, what's the point? It's not like five lug versus four lug is a concern for anyone other than somebody wanting to put custom wheels on a car, so why spend the money to "fix" something that isn't broken?

By the time the last Fox Mustang rolled off the assembly line in the summer of 1993, each car was pretty much pure profit. They had long ago paid for all the tooling and training to build the cars. If they had made a non-necessary change in 1988 that cost one dollar, by 1993 that would have cost Ford almost a million dollars in profit.

citmov · Apr 26, 2011

Wonder why they didn't choose to fix 2 big fox engineering fails: 1-ashtray and 2-ghetto bent seat frames

Must've been the whole cost factor but it's pretty sad that they knew about these problems but just chose to look the other way.

Why didn't Ford do it THAT way?

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