Emotions will be running high when the final Ford GT rolls off the assembly line next month in Wixom, but “lessons learned from the halo project will benefit the company for years to come,” the automaker said today. “When Bill Ford asked SVT to deliver the Ford GT in time to support our centennial celebration, it was to demonstrate to the world and to ourselves that we can build great products,” said Advanced Product director Hau Thai-Tang. “I think this will be the greatest legacy of the Ford GT. It is the most technologically advanced and most capable car that we have ever put into production. It is the ultimate expression of our creative design excellence, technical know-how and rich heritage.”
“It’ll be a bittersweet moment for our team. We have always intended the GT to be a low-volume car with a limited production run to ensure exclusivity,” said Thai-Tang. “We hope to someday have another chance to do a similar program like the Ford GT. In the meantime, the team will take great satisfaction in knowing that we’ve delivered the greatest American performance car ever.”
“I’d like to see it go on for another year or two, but I’m content. I’ve learned a lot from this program,” said Camilo Pardo, who designed the GT. “It has been a complete experience, from the initial sketch to the development of the concept and then walking that concept car through to production.
“You can’t imagine,” said engineering manager Fred Goodnow. “I’m at the twilight of my career, and the GT has been the fulfillment of a dream.”
Concept to production in 15 months
Engineering, tooling, producing and assembling the vehicles within 15 months was an enormous challenge, however, since it normally takes up to 52 months to bring a new vehicle through to fruition.
“It was insanely fast,” said Camilo Pardo. “Yet those cars were put together very carefully by hand and their objectives were solid enough and dependable enough that we could give the keys to a journalist, let him drive it around the track and say that this was our production car.”
“We had a very small, highly skilled and specialized workforce – designers, engineers and suppliers — working together in a very close environment to develop a car that met all the customer and regulatory standards in a fraction of the time by stretching the envelope,” said Goodnow. “No decisions were second-guessed, either by the team or by management. And that gave the team the drive and the passion to proceed forward to get it done.”
Goodnow says the GT project also proved that crash modeling can be done effectively in the virtual world.
“The correlation between our virtual crash modeling, which had never been done before, and what we saw on the real prototypes when we crashed real cars was uncanny,” he said. “This is a direct benefit to future Ford cars because it saves a huge amount of time and money. Workhorse prototypes can cost more than a half a million dollars, and we didn’t do any for crash.”
