Comets, Fairlanes, Montegos, Torinos, Mustangs, Cougars, Mavericks and that formerly mentioned “junior Mercedes” of the ’70s all sprung from this little car’s humble roots. Until the new 1972 Torino platform, this Falcon’s lineage would stretch to cover almost every Ford passenger car not called Galaxie/LTD or Thunderbird. Of course, the downside was that the shrunken-big-Ford formula of the Falcon took a bigger bite out of the sales of standard Ford models than was the case with Chevy or Plymouth.įor the Ford Motor Company, the 1960 Falcon was important for another reason: It would provide the basic DNA for the lion’s share of the company’s products pretty much up through the 1980 Ford Granada.
61 ford flacon for sale manual#
Six cylinders up front, and cooled by water, hooked to a 3 speed manual or 2 speed automatic with a lever on the column and two bench seats for seating six friendly people – oddly, this was a configuration that, similar as it might have been to pretty much everything built ten years earlier by everyone in the industry, could not be duplicated in a compact found at either a Chevy or Plymouth showroom. And if that new ’61 Ford had become too big for your liking, the smaller Falcon should suit you to a T. Did you like your 1951 Ford? Then you were sure to like a 1961 Ford too, because while there had been some important updates, there was clearly a continuation between the old and the new. Any questions? And boy did it work.Īfter Studebaker, Ford of 1960-62 was the most conservative of car companies, making conservative cars for conservative people. In the end, it was Ford that had the winning combination – simply take a standard Ford sedan and make it all smaller. And then there were the stalwarts from AMC and Studebaker who kept on with their “something old, something new” formula. Corvair went all whiz-bang on a rear engine and modern styling, while the Valiant went all – well, nobody was really sure. With the pickups, it took several stabs at new and unique configurations before someone brilliantly decided that the best compact truck was a smaller version of a standard truck. The quest for the American compact car that was “just right” was a lot like the later search for a successful small pickup truck that played out a decade or so later. And of those three, it was the Falcon that proved how big the market for a compact in America could be. But then the big three made their big splash in the compact market in 1960 and never looked back. American Motors and Studebaker were able to make sales by going where the big three were not, each in its own not-quite-modern way. Before the 1960 Falcon, the market for compact cars had been for niche players. The first generation Ford Falcon was a pivotal car, both for the Ford Motor Company and for the U.S. Quite unwittingly, she showed us what “just right” is all about. In 1961, a woman went into a Ford Dealer and picked out this car. “Just Right” is something to be appreciated. Things can be too big or small, too hard or soft, or too warm or cold. ( first posted ) The reason that the childhood story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears resonates so deeply with many of us is that there are so many things around us that are a little wrong.
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