The first Ford cars to reach Europe early in 1904 were 8-hp twin-cylinder 'gas buggies' designated 'Model A'. Despite their billing as 'America’s Favorite Car', they made little impression on the market, though they did introduce the name of Ford to the British, French and Russian markets. Unconfirmed legend claims that the first customer to purchase a Ford car in Britain was a Liverpool doctor specialising in the treatment of wealthy lunatics!

An attempt to promote the first four-cylinder Ford, the 1905 Model B (above), by running three of them on the streets of London as taxicabs, failed to attract potential customers. It was, nevertheless, one of the very first uses of petrol-engined cabs in Britain.

Things began to take off with the arrival in 1906 of the four-cylinder Model N Ford, which offered remarkable value for money and was astutely marketed in Britain with the choice of four-seated tourer and landaulette coachwork to increase its appeal to British motorists (it was only available with two-seater bodywork in America).

Henry Ford on a Model A

In many ways Model N paved the way for Henry Ford’s most famous car, the Model T, which made its world show debut at the Olympia Motor Exhibition in London in November 1908, a matter of weeks after production had begun in Detroit. With a 2.9-litre four-cylinder engine and two-speed and reverse epicyclic transmission operated by pedals, Model T was simple and reliable.

In 1911 it would become the first Ford car to be built outside North America when Ford England, encouraged by the booming sales of Model T, began assembly in a former tramcar works at Trafford Park, Manchester. The venture proved hugely successful and led to the opening of a chain of Ford factories across Europe.

However, during the 1920s the Model T was increasingly disadvantaged by the vehicle tax regime in many European countries, which imposed duty in proportion to the engine capacity. Henry Ford’s innate conservatism meant that the Model T became increasingly outdated, and to the end of its long production run it only had rear wheel brakes while all its rivals had braking on all four wheels. Nevertheless, by the time Model T production ended in 1927, some 320,000 out of the total worldwide production of around 16 million units of Ford’s "Universal Car" had been built in Ford’s European plants.

The successor to the Model T, the four-cylinder Model A of 1927-31, was rugged yet stylish, and for the first time on any Ford featured a conventional three speed and reverse gearchange. In an attempt to compete against smaller engined rivals, Model A was offered in two sizes of power unit, 2033cc and 3285cc.

But Henry Ford's vision of a "Universal Car" built to an identical specification the world over had run its course with the Model T, and the new Model A was, even in its smaller engined version, still bigger and thirstier than its rivals.

While the four-cylinder Model B and 3.6-litre V8 that were to succeed Model A in 1932 were fine, value for money cars, nevertheless they still had the large engines that American motorists demanded. Something more attuned to the requirements of the size-conscious European market was needed urgently. The collapse in Ford sales threatened the newly opened Dagenham factory with closure.

In response to an urgent appeal for a small car to reverse the flagging sales in Europe, Henry Ford pulled out all the stops. A new small car with a 933cc engine and trend-setting styling was created in Dearborn in the unprecedentedly short time of five months from drawing board to prototype, and was in full production at the Dagenham factory in August 1932. This new Ford Eight – built in France as the 6CV Ford and in Germany as the Ford Köln – was the first of a long-lived line of small European Fords that were to last until the beginning of the 1960s.

Despite its hasty development programme, the new Ford Eight had remarkably few teething troubles and quickly gave Ford Britain over 40 per cent of the 8-hp market segment. A keen price cutting programme saw the introduction in Britain of the £100 Popular in October 1935 It was the first and only four seater saloon car to be offered on the British market at so low a price. This tough little car was to give many motorists their first taste of new car motoring.

The radically changed political climate of the 1930s saw the rise of protectionism in both Germany and France. The insistence on nationally sourced components saw the collapse of plans to centre all European production on Dagenham. From the mid-1930s German Fords took on a national identity with new models , mechanically similar to their British counterparts but with radically different styling, marketed under the names Eifel and Rheinland.

Ford France, which entered a short-lived alliance with Strasbourg based Mathis during the 1930s, produced a range of "Matford" V8s for which a smaller 2.2-litre "Alsace" V8 engine was developed (and subsequently used in some British V8 models too).

The bodyshell originally designed for the Matford was also used for the smaller British V8s. Fitted with a more imposing grille and bonnet, it served for Ford Britain’s first new model after the Second World War, the famous Ford V8 Pilot. This was to have had a new 2.5 litre V8 power unit, but development problems saw this replaced by the tried and trusted 3.6-litre V8 engine designed in the 1930s.

However, the end of 1950 saw the launch by Ford Britain of the first entirely new post war model from any Ford company worldwide in the shape of the Consul and Zephyr, four and six cylinder models that embodied the very latest ideas in automotive design.

1958 Ford Zephyr

They had the first ever overhead valve Ford engines, whose oversquare dimensions were a response to the scrapping by the British government of the archaic horsepower tax calculated on piston area. Their monocoque bodyshells were state of the automotive art, while their MacPherson Strut independent front suspension represented the first-ever application of a system that has since become an industry standard.

At that time Ford Germany, which did not resume private car production until 1948, was still using the prewar 1172cc Ford ten engine first seen in 1934. While the French Ford company, free since 1939 of its Matford ties and housed in a magnificent factory completed just prior to the outbreak of war, was ploughing its own furrow with the Vedette, a small V8 car originally designed as a postwar economy model for the American market.

But though it had been judged too small for the United States, it was too large for postwar France, and poor sales led to the end of production by Ford France and the sale of its factory to Simca, who continued production of the Vedette under their own name until 1958.

In 1955 Ford Germany moved out of the restrictions on product development necessitated by the company’s postwar recovery with the introduction of the Taunus 15M, which had a lively new overhead valve 1498cc power unit. A 1698cc Taunus 17M joined the range in 1957. A new version of this model launched in 1960 (above) had distinctively rounded lines and ovoid headlamps, features which earned it the nickname "Cologne Egg".

Developed initially as a concept by Ford Britain’s first research & development centre, the 1959 105E Anglia (above) represented a complete break with Ford engineering tradition. Its high revving 997cc overhead valve engine had a stroke/bore ratio of 0.6:1, the lowest of any contemporary production car, and quickly became the preferred power unit for the new Formula Junior racing category. It was the first Ford car anywhere with a four speed transmission, and its unorthodox reverse rake rear window gave the rear passengers more headroom and kept clear in bad weather.

Ford claimed the new model, also the first British Ford to be fitted with electric windscreen wipers instead of the quirky vacuum wipers, was 'the world's most exciting light car' despite the simultaneous launch of the new front-wheel driven BMC Mini. But the Anglia was the only one of the two cars that made a profit!

The confusion of competing model lines saw the German and British companies operating as rivals in several European markets. This inter-company rivalry came to a head at the beginning of the 1960s when Ford Germany collaborated with the North American Ford Division to develop a new family car intended to rival the cult success of the Volkswagen Beetle in the USA and replace the popular Taunus 12M in Germany.

The first-ever front wheel drive car to be built by Ford, the new model was codenamed 'Cardinal' after a small red-plumaged North American bird. Its V4 engine was another first for Ford. Ford US decided not to proceed with the project, which was continued by Ford Germany and became the new 12M.

When Sir Patrick Hennessy, chairman of Ford Britain, saw an early prototype in the Dearborn design studios, he immediately ordered the British product development staff to proceed with all haste in developing a competitor for the new German model.

While the specification of the car that was codenamed "Archbishop" in a humorous reference to its German rival (in the canonical hierarchy, an Archbishop outranks a Cardinal) was conventional enough, it employed the most advanced body design techniques then available to combine strength and weight-saving.

Ford Britain established a structures department at its Dagenham plant and, by employing stress techniques previously only used in the aircraft industry, produced a bodyshell that was lighter and stronger than anything that had gone before.

The weight saving – equivalent to that of an extra passenger - enabled Ford’s designers to make the car more roomy, creating a new "C/D" class that bridged the gap between the medium ("C") and large (D") categories and would ultimately represent about a quarter of all new car sales.

The new model – the first Cortina – went on sale in 1962 and by the time the Mk I Cortina went out of production in 1966, over a million had been sold. It also gave birth to the first high performance derivative of a European production Ford, the 1963 Lotus Cortina, hand assembled in very small numbers by Lotus at Cheshunt, UK and fitted with a 1558cc four cylinder twin-cam Lotus built derivative of Ford’s standard pushrod 1.5 litre engine .

At the other end of the scale, Ford developed one of the outstanding performance cars of all time after Enzo Ferrari had broken off merger talks with Ford at the eleventh hour in 1963. Henry Ford II promised he would defeat Ferrari on the track and a design team was set up in Slough, UK, to develop a mid-engined sports-racing car.

The result was the Ford GT, later known as the GT40 because it stood just 40 inches high, which in 1966 achieved with a spectacular 1-2-3 victory at Le Mans, the first of four successive wins for the GT40 line. Though the GT40 was intended as a track car, many of the production run of 134 chassis were built to road specification and there was even a road-going Mk III version (above), of which just seven examples were built.

Design, development and manufacture is coordinated across Europe
The first new Ford to appear after the formation of Ford of Europe in 1967 was the 1968 Escort. Designed as a replacement for the 105E Anglia, it became by default the first pan-European Ford car since the 1930s, and was built by Ford Germany’s Saarlouis plant and at Ford Britain’s Halewood factory.

It, too, had an exciting limited production high performance derivative, this time built in-house at Halewood. The Twin Cam used the Lotus Cortina engine in a specially strengthened Escort bodyshell and led to the establishment of the Ford Advanced Vehicles Operation at Aveley in the UK in 1970 to hand assemble high-performance versions of the Escort at a rate which at its peak approached 30 cars a day.

A year after the Escort came the fondly remembered Capri, a European equivalent of America’s highly successful Mustang 'personal car'. Billed as 'the car you always promised yourself', the Capri was a sporty 2+2 fastback coupe that came in a bewildering variety of custom plan trim options and engine sizes.

Initially launched with 1.3, 1.6 and 2.0-litre engines, from 1971 the Capri was also available with a 3.0 litre V6 engine to create what was claimed at the time to be the fastest production line car ever sold by Ford in Britain, with a top speed of 120 mph (193km/h).

In the early 1970s Ford Germany built a limited production road/race derivative, the Capri RS2600, but its 124 mph (200km/h) Halewood built successor, the RS3100, was only in production for a few months, a victim of the mid-1970s oil crisis.

The convergence of the Ford car lines in Europe, most evident in the way that the former rival Cortina and Taunus lines came to share a common bodyshell and mechanical specification from 1973, came to full maturity in 1976 with the launch of the Fiesta supermini.

Ford's bold decision to build the Fiesta, taken during the trauma of the mid 1970s oil shock, confounded some of the most deeply entrenched beliefs of the motor industry -'mini car, mini profits' and 'you can't build a new model in a new factory in a new country'.

In addition to the established Ford plants in Britain and Germany, the Fiesta was to be built in a brand new factory in Spain, where the previous manufacturing venture had ended as a result of the Civil War of the 1930s.

There was input from all round the Ford world into the remarkable little Fiesta, which broke much new ground for Ford. It was the company's first front wheel drive small car, the first with a transverse engine, and it had the smallest engine Ford had built since the 8-hp Anglia ended production in the early 1950s.

It proved a phenomenal success, with a million units being sold by early 1979, a record broken by Ford’s next small front-wheel drive car, the 1980 Escort, which had only its name in common with the two marks of Escort that had gone before. By 1981, just 13 months from the start of production, Escort sales reached a million, the fastest time ever to this production milestone.

The following year, the Cortina/Taunus range was replaced by the radically different Sierra, with aerodynamic styling and all round independent suspension. Its bold thinking paved the way for the 1993 Mondeo, which was to sell over 2.5 million in more than 60 markets round the world and established Ford as an industry style leader.

Ford built on the technological lead established by the Sierra with the 1985 Scorpio/Granada big car range which was not only the first volume car to enter production with anti-lock braking as standard but also the first European car in which every single exterior panel was made using computer-aided design and manufacture to achieve absolute precision.

Today, the pace of product development has reached a new dimension as Ford is committed to offering customers a range of products to meet all their individual needs. The company is on track to launch 45 new products in 5 years, a rate of product introduction 3 times that of the previous 5 years.

Henry Ford, whose company was the first to use three terms which today are part of the universal lexicon of the motor car – 'automation', 'mass production' and 'service' - believed that the sale was only the beginning of a lasting transaction.

He also observed, "the further you look back, the further you can look ahead." After 100 years on the roads of Europe, Ford is looking further ahead than most.

Ford Focus C-Max, launched at the recent Geneva Show.