Henry Ford's first car company became Cadillac after he walked out
Henry Ford's first carmaker, founded in 1901, was renamed the Cadillac Motor Company after he left and took the rights to his own name with him. So when he launched Ford Motor Company in 1903, nervous investors made a local banker president, hoping to stop the founder from abandoning a second firm.
Ford was 39 when the new company opened in a converted factory with 28,000 dollars from twelve backers, among them John and Horace Dodge, who later built their own car brand. At first small teams of two or three men assembled each car from bought-in parts, and only a few cars left the Detroit works each day. Within ten years that had changed completely. In 1913 the Highland Park plant introduced the first moving assembly line, and Ford began making many parts itself; by 1914 the approach was famous worldwide as Fordism.
Its signature product was the Model T of 1908, which sold in millions over nearly two decades. The Model A that replaced it in 1927 became the first series-built car fitted with a laminated safety-glass windscreen, and in 1932 Ford offered the first cheap car with a V8. Later came the Mustang, unveiled at the 1964 New York World's Fair, and safety features such as rear seat belts, child-proof locks and a seat belt warning light. Not everything worked: the Edsel, launched for 1958, flopped and was dropped by November 1959.
The company went public in 1956, yet special shares still give the Ford family 40 per cent of the votes, making it one of the world's largest family-controlled firms. Henry's great-grandson Bill Ford became chief executive in 2001.
Its sharpest test came in the 2000s. By 2005 its bonds had been downgraded to junk, and a turnaround plan closed 14 factories and cut 30,000 jobs. In December 2006 Ford pledged nearly all of its assets as collateral to raise about 25 billion dollars in borrowing capacity. When the 2008 crisis hit, Ford struggled, but unlike its two big Detroit rivals it never needed a federal rescue.
Source: Ford Motor Company
