Ford Motor Co. on Wednesday unveiled its Ford Heritage Fleet of vehicles from important points in the over 120-year-old company’s history.
The Michigan-based automaker has put together a collection of almost 500 vehicles in total, with about 175 vehicles included in the U.S. Heritage Fleet.
The vehicles within the Ford Heritage Fleet highlight various achievements, technological advancements and production benchmarks that the company has had over the years and will also provide insights and inspiration for future vehicle development, Ford said.
Ted Ryan, Ford’s archives and heritage brand manager, told FOX Business in an interview his team “got direction from senior management to begin to pull together Ford’s heritage fleet around the world” a “little bit” more than a year ago.
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“We had a couple that we knew of already. Ford of England had 150-ish cars. Ford of Germany, 100. So we knew those were there, and they were activated in different ways, but we had never had an active fleet in the U.S.,” he said.
Different groups like Product Development and Ford Performance had kept vehicles over the years “but it had never been systematically organized and preserved and restored … so over the past year, we have tracked down about 175 vehicles in the United States from a variety of different partners,” Ryan told FOX Business.
Ford said Product Development, Ford Performance, Communications and the Archives sourced the vehicles that make up the U.S. Heritage Fleet.
Ryan said some of the expansive Ford Heritage Fleet will be at its new Product Development Center and the company’s headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, with plans to also “activate” vehicles for family days at its assembly plants across the country.
Overall, the “idea is to take what is essentially the Heritage Fleet and not look back at 120 years of history, but to find a way to use it going forward” for future vehicles, Ryan explained.
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Selecting vehicles for inclusion in the Fort Heritage Fleet involved creating a “collection management policy” and a “collections storyline” focused on the “importance of the vehicle” and “how it can be used,” according to Ryan.
The 10 millionth Mustang, one of Ford’s first four-door Broncos, three generations of Cobra R Mustangs, a 10-cylinder Mustang prototype, a Lincoln Navigator concept vehicle and the three 2004 GTs that Ford “used to introduce the GT brand back to the world again” are among some of the vehicles in the Ford Heritage Fleet, he said.
With the Ford Heritage Fleet, Ford teams are able to take learnings from past vehicles that they can then use to inform their creation of future vehicles, according to Ford.
“The Bronco is the perfect example,” Ryan said in the interview.
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“The design team was in the archives at least once every other month to look at different design cues that we were pulling at that point off of drawings and earlier brochures and earlier fabric samples,” he said. “Now, we’ll have the actual vehicle that we can make available to the designers to see and do 3-D scans and do all the other things that really let you dissect the vehicle and understand the DNA of what that car, what that truck is, and how it can be made better.”
Some other Ford vehicles included in the Ford Heritage Fleet include the 1938 V-8 Ambulance, the 1914 Model-T and the Mustang that appeared at the top of the Empire State Building in 2015.
There are also some “really cool” Ford Performance vehicles and multiple experimental vehicles, among others, according to Ryan.
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