Word: lacocca
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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THAT is Ford Executive Vice President Lee lacocca's earthy account of a decision that will shake up the U.S. auto market well into the 1970s. This week Ford plants in St. Thomas, Ont., and Kansas City, Mo., begin turning out lacocca's "hell of a good buy." It is the much-trumpeted Maverick, first of Detroit's new line of small cars. List price of the Maverick...
...length and $2,283 in price. Partly because more and more Americans want smaller and less costly cars, imports have swelled from 52,000 in 1955 to 986,000 last year, when they accounted for more than 10% of the 9.4 million sold in the U.S. As lacocca told TIME'S Detroit Bureau Chief Don Sider: "We don't assume that the Maverick is just out to arrest the trend. We expect to get some customers back. We expect this to be a free...
Freudian Gilt. The company has tooled up to produce as many as 400,000 Mavericks a year, and lacocca has suggested that he would be happy if sales in the first twelve months reached about 300,000. That would make the Maverick a $600 million-a-year proposition. The car will go on sale April 17, five years to the day after lacocca introduced the Mustang, which has been Ford's most successful product since the Model T. The small-car field will soon be crowded. American Motors' new entry, the Hornet, will come out this fall...
...considerable ground to imports. The Falcon, which reached a peak of 493,000 sales in 1961, was down to 163,000 that year-and to even less in 1967. At a meeting of Ford's new-products group in the "Glass House," the company's Dearborn headquarters, lacocca decided that it was time to move. Chairman Henry Ford agreed...
Beep Beep. The immediate reason for lacocca's optimism is the reception that the '69 models are getting. Last week Detroit reported that sales for Oct. 1-10, the first period during which all '69s were up for sale, were running at an average 34% a day ahead of the same period a year before. The biggest improvement was achieved by Ford, which increased sales by 180% over, last year, when a 49-day strike slowed its business to a crawl. The other three automakers also increased sales: General Motors by 11.7%, Chrysler by 7%, and American...