Ford Model Y
by David Finlay (Wednesday 28 December 2011)
Few people know of it now, but the Model Y was one of the most significant cars Ford ever produced. It was the first of the company's cars designed specifically for Europe, and in the UK it became the dominant model in its class, accounting for over 40% of sales. And of all the reasons why that might be, one in particular stands out.
The example owned by the Ford Heritage Centre was built in 1937, but the Model Y (later to be known - though unofficially, unlike later Fords - as the Popular) had first gone into production five years earlier. After just one year it was given a facelift, amounting to a longer radiator and a rakishly curved front bumper replacing the previous completely straight one, and in October 1935 Ford dropped the price of the two-door version to just £100.
No other four-seat car before or since has been sold in this country for so little; can you wonder, then, that it attracted so many customers? The four-door Model Y would set you back £112, but even that was £6 less than Austin was asking for its Ruby, the next cheapest four-seater on the market.
At the time, it was considered a family car, roughly the equivalent of the present-day Focus, but it's clear that families either ate less or were not so fussy about personal space (possibly both) in those days. Sitting in the driver's seat, I can touch every window without much difficulty. And if I'm cramped, imagine what it must have been like for the less than svelte actor Peter Ustinov, who briefly drove this car in the early 1980s.
(Why? Something to do with a film, possibly the adaptation of Agatha Christie's Evil Under The Sun. Nobody at Ford seems to know. If you have information about this I'd be pleased to hear it.)
Now, I like driving 1930s cars. This is my fourth, after another Ford, a Vauxhall and a Skoda, and I would be happy to own any one of them. But I have to say that this test verged on the high-pitched, simply because it was conducted in very heavy rain.
Cossetted young thing that I am, there is nothing in my motoring experience to prepare me for driving a Model Y in these conditions. For a start, when I get in, I realise that I'm not going to be able to go anywhere until I can unsteam the windows. There's no air-conditioning, of course, but there is an alternative, because there's a knob that allows you to open the top-hinged windscreen by a few degrees. I'm going to get cold, but at least I'll be able to see where I'm going.
Well, partly. Another peculiar feature of the Model Y is that its wipers rely for their motive force on the amount of vacuum in the inlet manifold, and if you're accelerating, or even simply maintaining a constant speed on a very gentle uphill slope, the vacuum goes away and the wipers stop.
Even in the 1930s, this was not regarded as one of the car's best features. In his authoritative work, The Ford In Britain Centenary File, author Eric Dymock quotes a contemporary review published in The Light Car magazine: "It would be too much to expecr an electric screen wiper on a car of such low price, but more than once during heavy rain we had occasion to wish that this were a £101 Ford."
You can perhaps understand, then, why I don't really want to drive at much above 25mph (not that the car itself has a problem with that - its little 933cc engine may produce only 23bhp flat-out, but even at that I'm not exactly taking it to the limit). The steadily growing line of traffic behind me doesn't appreciate this, though, so I risk a surge of acceleration up to 30mph.
If other road users want me to take things still further, tough luck. I'm having enough trouble as it is. I'm veering to the left and the kerb is approaching, so I steer to correct, but nothing much happens for about the first seventeen turns of the wheel.
Then it turns out that this is too much. I'm about to run over the cat's eyes in the middle of the road, and risk being impaled on the front of the next vehicle to approach on the other side. This will surely lead to poor circulation and shortness of breath, because if ever there were a car guaranteed to score zero in a Euro NCAP crash test it's this one, so I turn the wheel the other way eleven or twelve times, which seems to do the trick.
A cautious 180-degree turn at the nearest roundabout, and it's back to the safety of the hotel car park. Short though the experience has been, my nerves are jangling, but almost as soon as I'm at a standstill I dream about going back out again. The Model Y is that kind of car.
Over coffee, a colleague and I chat vaguely about the possibility of pooling resources and buying a Model Y. It would, we agree, be a fun thing to co-own and use for gentle runs at the weekend. Preferably on dry days.
But he's larger than I am, larger even than Ustinov was, so we would have to take turns.
Comments
I am from a Ford family,
I am from a Ford family, virtually all the men in the family worked at Fords Dagenham plant. My father was in charge of the experimental foundry. My eldest brother was a Foreman on the crankshaft lines. My other brother was a pattern maker who emigrated to Windsor Canada shortly after he came out of his appreticeship. I however never wanted to work in a factory, even though I always enjoyed going in for visits and revelled in the fact that I was privvy to any news about upcoming new models. The strongest memory was seeing a car park full of Thames Traders, on one particular visit,quite some time before they were announced to the public. I did take and pass the Trade School exam but confessed ,on interview, that I didn't want to work at Fords as I had already entered an apprenticeship to become a Plant Mechanic with a local firm of Plant Hire Contractors on the town quay in Barking. This entailed day release for my Gity & Guilds training at South East Essex Technical College. The engineering facility was funded by Fords and I would imagine that it was probably one of the best equiped colleges in the country. We were tasked with the problem of getting one of the old and extremely reliable 4D Diesel engines to run on its side in preparation for the D series lorries which subsequently ran the engine at a very shallow angle. After all this rambling, the point of this is that the engineering department had a model Y that had been cut away in sections, like you would see at motor shows of that era. Happy days from 1960 on. So much water and experience under the bridge since then.
Wonderful to hear about your
Wonderful to hear about your experiences - thank you very much for sharing!
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