Step Inside Ford's Newly Unveiled Heritage Fleet Loaded With Blue Ovals Worth Curating

Believe it or not, until recently Ford Motor Company North America wasn’t maintaining a collection of its greatest automotive hits. GM and Stellantis both have such collections. So do Ford UK, Ford of Germany, and Ford of Australia amounting to some 500 vehicles in all. Following a visit to the British collection, CEO Jim Farley returned home resolved to assemble such a collection for North America too. To make this happen, Ford hired Edward “Ted” Ryan, a 21-year archivist veteran at Coca-Cola, who had earlier established the Atlanta Braves Museum at Turner Field.

“We didn't do it just to keep old cars and to have a museum,” Ryan explains. “The intent of this is to have a viable fleet that can be used by all the different teams within Ford.” The result of his team’s efforts is the Ford Heritage Fleet of cars, 49 of which it showed us—24 Ford Performance vehicles, 15 concept cars, 6 “archive collection” vehicles, and 4 Ford marketing/communications cars. The collection has been curated to help Ford tell its story, to inspire its own designers and product planners, and for outreach. Note that Ryan’s team has also developed the Ford Heritage Vault, a collection of printed and collateral materials like brochures and advertising, which is open for search and download by the public.

Not a Museum

The Henry Ford Museum already exists and its on-display and back-catalogue collection is vast and includes many Ford products, which the Motor Company can access if it needs. The Heritage fleet has been assembled largely from vehicles that various departments squirreled away.

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Cars such as the last Mustang and first F-150 off the line when Dearborn Assembly made that switchover. These vehicles were tucked away at the plant.

Remember the PR and marketing stunt timed to coincide with Mustang’s 50th anniversary, where they disassembled an S550 Mustang, sent it up the freight elevator in pieces, and reassembled it atop the Empire State Building? That car and the elevator mockup used to develop it are in the Communications collection, along with the 10 millionth Mustang and an original non-running auto-show version of the sixth-gen Bronco.

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Performance Collection Highlights

Parked alongside the earliest 1993 Fox Body Mustang Cobra (no. 9) and the very first Cobra R street-legal race cars built in 1993, 1995, and 2000 (the first four cars in the above lineup), shown with its hood up, is a 1999 SN95 Mustang V-10 mule.

Yes, it’s (probably) the world’s only V-10-powered Mustang, and rest assured its engine shares nothing with the truck V-10. It was created by cutting two modular V-8s and welding them together; assembling them with billet cams and crankshaft, and running them with two separate engine-control computers running five cylinders each. This engine development program supported the stillborn 2004 Ford Shelby Cobra concept known as “Project Daisy.” This modern-day front-engine two-seater was designed to leverage many of the chassis parts and tooling investments made for “Project Petunia,” the Ford GT.

Speaking of which, these are the three first concept GTs built to commemorate Ford’s 100th anniversary. Originally finished in red, white, and blue, the navy blue car ended up getting repainted in Gulf livery to promote that new color option.

The collection includes two second-gen GTs, including this 2017 model built to demonstrate the then new Liquid Carbon bodywork. The way the weave aligns perfectly across all the panel gaps is truly amazing and explains why the option added about a quarter-million to the price. Only 30 were built this way, of which this was the first.

An unexpected gem was this Ford SVT Lightning Bolt Ranger Prototype, which MotorTrend drove in 2004—a skunkworks “what-if?” thought exercise in which a 5.4-liter supercharged V-8 from the full-size Lightning got jammed into a half-ton-lighter Ranger pickup, imbuing it with 420 hp and 480 lb-ft of tire-shredding torque.

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SVT’s car catalog is also well represented in the Ford Performance collection, by the very last 2000 SVT Contour—number 2,150, still wearing its $23,630 window sticker (about $44,650 today), an Infra-Red 2002 Focus SVT media demonstrator, and a Kona Blue 2016 Fiesta ST.

Concept Highlights

We barely remember the Ford Reflex concept from the 2006 Detroit show, but its current relevance as a 65-mpg diesel-electric hybrid certainly justifies its inclusion in the collection. Fun features include head- and taillamps that somehow collect solar energy, and an interior made of post-industrial waste from Nike athletic shoes.

The 2002 Ford MA Concept was conceived as an art object shown not at auto shows, but at museums like New York’s MoMA. Named for the Asian philosophy of “the space between,” in which two concepts can exist in a mutually beneficial relationship, it was designed for either a low-speed electric motor or a small gas engine. It was also designed to be flat-pack shipped, and its 500 pieces bolted together by the end user.

Another pretty out-there concept was the 2007 Ford Airstream, its lozenge shape and finish inspired by the iconic travel trailers, it was driven by a HySeries Drive hydrogen-fuel-cell hybrid-electric powertrain and featured a conventional driver’s door and rear hatch, with a giant gullwing aperture on the passenger side that covered two-thirds the length of the car. Inside are orange cloth egg-type seats.

Did you know the 2004 Ford Bronco Concept was featured in the 2018 movie Rampage, featuring Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson? He toured Ford design while the design of the current Bronco was underway and he fell in love with it.

Before 2004’s smaller OG-style Bronco Concept came along, Ford toyed with something more akin to an OJ-era full-size design with this 1998 Ford F-250 Super Duty Bronco concept. Sharing some cues with the 1997 Ford Rox F-150 concept truck like the short bed and yellow paint, a second version was created for personal use. This is the first time this concept has been shown outside the studio.

This tiny 2010 Ford Start Concept was a star of the 2010 Beijing show, featuring Ford’s smallest EcoBoost engine and sized to fit the global trend toward megacities and was hailed for its “playful take on kinetic design.” Originally shown in red, the Start is now finished in a less racy silver.

Archive Collection Highlights

Among the Ford F-150 Lightning’s earliest progenitors is this 2000 Ford Ranger Electric. Built between 1998 and 2002, most examples of Ford’s first all-electric production vehicle featured a 26-kWh nickel-metal-hydride battery powering a 90-hp AC induction motor through a (super tall by today’s standards) 3:1 reduction drive. Range was said to be 65 miles at 65 mph. An actual owner accrued almost 30,000 miles on this one—40 miles at a time by the end.