Origin of the FGT
A lot of unexpected factors, many of which we could not have been anticipated, came into alignment in January, 2002 and which led to the FGT program. That the Centennial would occur in June, 2003 (and had a big budget) may have been the most significant of those factors but the huge, positive reception by the press and the public of the yellow show car at the 2002 Detroit International Auto Show was a close second. The chatter at the time was that it was "a great looking concept car but but Ford will never do anything with it". And, truth be told, there was a strong precedent for that view. Remember the GT 90!
Just after the show opened, with the FGT being selected as "Car of the Show" (or some such name), Bill Ford stopped me while I was in the office of the Chief Financial Officer ( I was already back consulting at Ford). He was responding to the public reaction and stories in the two Detroit newspapers. Bill said to me "I don't know whether we should do this car or not but lot of people seem to think we should. Would you have a look at and let me know what you think?" He only had two conditions. One was that we had to have a car for the Centennial, 18 months away, in June, 2003. The other was that I keep the main part of the Company out of the program. If goes without saying that the Ford team, led by Chris Theodore, could well have done everything I did, perhaps better, but Bill Ford wanted them not to be distracted from the business of designing the high volume new cars and trucks. The FGT had the potential to be a huge distraction. In any event, I came back to Bill a couple of months later with a recommendation to go ahead and, as the old saying goes, the rest is history.
Interestingly, the question of cost and profit did not come up in that first discussion, although Bill knew that it would receive a lot of attention later, if we decided to do the car. One of the most important issues to address in a low volume car is to keep the investment cost low. That is why we ended up pushing the cars from one station to the next at the Troy facility. The argument is that, with low investment levels, you can recover your costs through pricing. We had a lot of pressure, especially from Jackie Stewart and Niki Lauda, to price it much higher than the $150,000 we ended up with. Still a lot of money but better than $250,000 or $300,000. We wanted loyal Ford customers to be able to afford it.
I don't recall the final profitably numbers for the program but it wouldn't surprise me if it had a small accounted loss. The car made up for that, to the great joy of everyone who worked on the program and many others as well, in a lot of other ways.
You need a lot of things to come to your favor in a program like this, which is why they are so rare. I recall telling the FGT team at the program kick-off in May, 2002, that being chosen to work on the FGT would be the highlight of their career. All down hill after that!
It was really fun.
