Technical List your favorite goofup by ford and GM. This may cause a war!!!

I think the 59 Ford rear tail lights were a big mistake on Ford's behalf. As far as the Chevy mistakes I would say the wood inside the doors on a lot of the early models.

 

Crazy talk. Certainly could be one of GM's most misunderstood cars, perhaps even by their own marketing folks, but far from a joke. I assume this is coming from someone with no actual experience with these cars.

I agree that GM stuck with wood for far too long, and that Ford really misread the market with the Edsel.

 

Those awful Mustang sharp pointed wind wings that could impale a person is my no. 1 vote followed by The Crosley "Hot Shot" name. A 40 Cubic inch engine car will never be a "Hot Shot" in its original stock form.

 

Chrysler producing three different hemi blocks: one each for the Chrysler, Dodge and DeSoto. Just think how smart it would have been to design the block just a bit lighter yet still able to accommodate displacements from the 331 to the 392 and put them in to all four - Plymouth included - car models. The interchangeability would have saved them millions of dollars, I bet.

 

Amen!! To That!!

 

l guess I’m odd, always liked Mopars from 62-65.

 

I agree, it was a beautiful design but the $10,000 price tag was a bit much when Joe Lunchbox could buy a new house for $19,000. Then there was the recession that started in 1957 and continued in 1958, I think Ford’s marketing people saw the hand writing on the wall.

 

Cracks w part#s in Ford flatheads, flat cams in 307 Chevys, bad topend oiling and therefor ticking valve trains in Y Block Fords, spider gears made of glass in Tri5 Chevys(actually up to 64),drug abuse at the Mopar design centers since the mid 50s,those bigass Ford starters on Y Blocks and Flatheads ....

 

They did clue in, about 1955. They went to work and designed the B/RB series of big blocks that debuted in 1958. They were made for 20 years in displacements from 350 to 440 cu in and were the mainstay of their performance and luxury cars, Dodge trucks and motorhomes. They have their fans, even today, and are hard to beat for power and torque with long life and reliability, at a decent price.

 

In Ford's defense they brought out 5 all new cars in 10 years, 1955 - Thunderbird, 1958 - Edsel, 1960 - Falcon, 1962 - Fairlane, and 1964 1/2 - Mustang.
Every one was a smash hit except the Edsel. I dare say any director who made 5 movies in 10 years and had 4 box office smashes, or a ball team that won the World Series 4 times out of 5, would be taking bows and deserve them.

 

The '50s/early '60s were interesting times. There was a lot of technological progress that had excited the general population and Detroit tried to capitalize on it with very uneven success. They threw all sorts of things at the wall, but more than a few didn't stick...

GM tried EFI, aluminum motors, auto-dimming headlights, and the Corvair. The auto-dimmer couldn't tell the difference between car lights and street lights. The Corvair could be a dangerous car; a buddy had a early turbo spyder 'vert and at 90 mph (a speed it had little trouble making) the front end could come off the ground and swap ends. After the second time it did that, he got rid of it...

Chrysler also tried EFI, and started building 'unibody' cars; the end result of that being they became known as rust buckets. And they had no better luck with EFI than GM did.

Ford was always more conservative compared to GM or Chrysler, so they limited their high-tech to the retractables and the TeleTouch. But even these were ahead of the curve in terms of real-world reliability and unfortunately for Ford, they actually sold a lot of them.

Styling-wise, in the mid-late 50's GM and Chrysler went head-to-head on styling excess with varying rates of success. Again, Ford was more conservative; they usually limited their more extreme designs to the Mercury/Edsel (while it lived)/Lincoln nameplates.

 

Chrysler did build three different hemis in 55 how many gm v8s were there?

 

@Crazy Steve GM didn't try EFI in the 50s 60s that I'm aware of. They did have Fuel Injection in Chevy and Pontiac, but it was mechanical. Only Mopar and AMC/Rambler tried EFI in the 50s. Unless of course another American manufacturer did that I'm unaware of.

 

Oddly enough, it was the 1960 tail lights that got criticized by Ford execs. It was the first year since 1952 that they did not have round tail lights, and the worst sales. Some thought it was the tail lights, some thought the 60 Ford was too sophisticated for working class buyers. This is why the 61 is a throwback to 1957 and why they went back to round tail lights at least until 1965 or 66.

 

The man that designed the electrical system for the retractable ended up in a nut house....

 

So did a lot of guys who had to work on them, I bet.

 

I love my Fords and what they have accomplished for over a hundred years but I still shake my head at the uni-body pickups. If you desired a truck with less hauling ability just but a Ranchero.

 

Ford should have put hair around the horse collar and called it Ethel.

 

such a dud of an engine, and yet still so ever ever popular............doesn’t make sense does it..........?

 

would not have made any difference to either hotrodding or humanity.
I think the issues were related to styling and lack of cylinders.........

 

GM tried air suspension around '57-'58, not sure how long that lasted.

What was the idea behind the SBC splayed valve covers?

 

Particularly when they'd come up with this clean, trim, elegant update of the design for 1958:


...which they scrapped in favor of the overdone cross-eyed monster we got instead.

 

...I think that he must have also worked for Lucas...

.

 

1949 shoebox hood hinge design. Shoebox owners know what I'm talking about. 1950 and 1951 hinge retrofit works, even on a 1949 hood. See my website to see how it's done.

https://49fordcoupe.smugmug.com/Hood-Hinges-Retrofit-49-to-505/

 

Pre-1965:

GM - the Rochester type B carburetor
Ford - the Holley AA-1 carburetor
Chrysler - the Ball & Ball carburetor (all of them, no specific model)

Jon

 

Chrysler Airflow
Left front door is the same as the left rear door...
Tucker
Developed an engine that didn't have a camshaft but hydraulically operated the valves off a distributor valve body.
Not enough battery to spin the engine fast enough to build pressure to operate the valves...

Sent from my XT1585 using The H.A.M.B. mobile app

 

When Chevrolet killed the Grand Sport project, that car would have made Carroll Shelby's life a lot harder.

 

Actually, GM had the Turbo Hydramatic ready to go in 1957, it was copyright issues that held it up until 1963...

The four speed Super Hydramatic was a decent transmission, I had one on a big Pontiac 462 and it never gave me any issue and I flogged that car. I though it was pretty cool how it would ground itself in third and fourth gears and feel like a stick....

 

Would you like to elaborate on what was wrong with the B&B carburetor?

 

Copyright, that's like words, right? How did that get in the way?

I have enjoyed this thread, trying new things, some worked, some didn't. Maybe it stills goes on today but not with anything I would understand.