Henry Ford resisted replacing the Model T until rivals forced his hand
For nearly two decades the Model T carried Ford. By the mid-1920s, though, General Motors was offering stronger engines and more style, and Edsel Ford and the sales team pleaded for a new car. Henry finally gave in, and the Model A rolled off the line on October 20, 1927.
Henry focused on how the car would be built. He distrusted stamped sheet steel, which had made the Model T cheap, and wanted more drop-forged parts for durability, but his engineers eventually persuaded him that forging would push the price too high. Historians see the struggle as the moment the rigid first era of mass production gave way to a more flexible one.
The result was a thoroughly modern machine for its day. It was the first Ford with the now standard layout of clutch, brake, throttle and gearshift, though the brake and accelerator sat the opposite way round from today. The 3.3-litre four-cylinder made 40 horsepower and could reach about 65 mph, all four wheels had drum brakes, and the windscreen used safety glass, which was rare at the time. The fuel tank sat in the cowl and fed the carburettor by gravity.
Buyers queued up. Sales passed three million in March 1930, with nine body styles on offer, from a cheap roadster to a luxurious town car. By the end in March 1932, Ford had built 4,858,644. The Soviet maker GAZ produced a licensed copy, but a British version with a smaller engine was taxed heavily by horsepower and flopped.
Plenty of individual cars became celebrities. A 1930 sports coupe called the Ramblin' Wreck is the student mascot at Georgia Tech. Between 1992 and 1994 Hector Quevedo and his son drove a 1928 car 22,000 miles from Punta Arenas in Chile to Ford's headquarters in Dearborn, needing little more than a tyre and some gearbox work; it now sits in the Henry Ford Museum.
Source: Ford Model A (1927–1932)
