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"Lifeguard Design” at Ford for this week’s “Sales Ad Saturday”. For 1956, Ford was looking for an angle, something to differentiate their offerings from Chevrolet. Ford had beaten Chevrolet in the race to develop an efficient over-head valve V8 with the introduction of the Y-block in 1954, but Harley Earl and Ed Cole came up with something Ford couldn’t touch in 1955; the new Chevrolet Bel Air. Available with Chevrolet’s new optional OHV 265 V8, the public fell in love with t

A big day for Preston Tucker for this week’s ‘Sales Ad Saturday’. 74 years ago today, Tucker’s hastily developed prototype, the Tucker 48 was unveiled before an impatient crowd of several thousand people in Chicago. The crowd had plenty of reason to be impatient, as the car was well over an hour late for its premier, and barely made it at all. Accounts differ somewhat about all the different issues plaguing the prototype on the day of its debut, but no one must have been more

“What’s in a name” is the question for this week's 'Sales Ad Saturday’. This week in 1954, the Ford Motor Company officially formed a styling committee to begin working on the development of their new “E” (for Experimental) car. The car that the stylists were working on would eventually come to be known as the Edsel, a famously embarrassing and costly financial failure for The Ford Motor Company. The reasons behind the failure of the Edsel have been widely chronicled, but the

Taking a look at “The New Thrill” for this week’s ‘Sales Ad Saturday’. 74 years ago this week, on June 4th, 1947, Oldsmobile’s revolutionary new overhead valve V8 engine was first shown at the summer meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers. Nineteen months later, the very first 303 ci. “Rocket” engines would roll off the line. Initially offered only in the Oldsmobile 98 when introduced in January of ’49, Oldsmobile almost immediately decided to offer the same engine in