Uhm, really? Oh sure, they’ve made some stinkers over the years, like the 1972 Ford Gran Torino with the 351 Cleveland engine, which looked like a suffocating fish from the front and the 351 Cleveland spun bearings the way Republicans spin lies, but… terrorist? Well… so says the National Counterterrorism Center’s Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database.
Ford Motor Company. Terrorist organization. Can we say the words “our national security state has jumped the shark”? Just sayin’.
– Badtux the Sovok Penguin
I don’t know, I worked for ‘em for ten years and they can be quite the cutthroat bunch.
Yeah, but this list is supposedly for the *literally* cutthroat bunch, as in, folks who chop off heads with big knives. Same deal with the two year old on the list. Yeah, two year olds can be terrors, but terrorists? A whole fucking OCEAN of sharks being jumped here, yo!
- Badtux the Shark-fearin’ Penguin
(Hey, it’s a penguin thing).
As to the 351C engine, it may not have gone far, but it sure got there Fast. Impressive acceleration for a family clunker.
w3ski
True dat on the 351C. The hilarious thing is that while it was supposed to replace the 351W as an all-modern design (vs early Sixties), it had a total production lifespan of four years (1970-1974) because it also turned out to be a tremendously dirty engine despite having been designed around 1st generation emissions requirements, as well as having persistent oiling problems especially if you let the oil get sludgy, which happened easily in that era due to the poor quality of that era’s motor oils. After 1974 derivatives of the 351C survived only because the Windsor engine casting line couldn’t make enough 351′s and so they fitted modified Cleveland blocks with Windsor bits and pieces, and is just another example of Ford’s general engine incompetence where if ya looked at any particular Ford engine of 351 cubic inches and up, it was like a box of chocolates — you never knew what you’d find when you opened it up.
My mid-’70s 351W Gran (talk about misnomer) Turino was the fastest means of moving funds from my wallet toward my mechanic’s yacht fund, or his kid’s college tuition. It leaked gas, oil, transmission fluid, and coolant and overheated till he figured out that it was the 4-cylinder Maverick factory installed radiator that was causing the problem.
When I dumped the beauty, I had put a total of 2k miles on it, most of which were back and forth to the shop. My mechanic had tears in his eyes when I told him it was no longer in my possession. He had kids to feed, you know. I haven’t owned a Ford product since.
There’s a passage in Nick Harkway’s “The Goneaway World” that describes very nicely how this works.
It doesn’t end well.
Where in the fuck did you get your stats from? I worked for Ford back in those years and the 351 Cleveland was a hell of a lot better engine than the 351 Windsor. If the Cleveland spun bearings at times it’s because idiots used the wrong oil in them.
I’m not defending Ford, they have made mistakes over the years, but so has everyone else and even though I was master Ford mechanic for many years some of my favorite engines were made by others.
Been some time since they made it but one of my favorites was the 455 Olds engine.
Oh no, it’s Mr. Bill! Mr. Bill, who cares how superior the engine’s design is, if it quits running because it requires high-quality oil that wasn’t readily available in the early 70′s? Yes, the Cleveland had a better design *on paper*, but the reality is that it simply wasn’t reliable for most people, while the Windsor, while being an antique and wheezy design, was pretty much bullet-proof.
I really don’t have anything good to say about most Ford engines. Ford never seems to have had really excellent V8 engines, probably the only classic Ford V8 engine is the 302 Windsor and that’s only because they ignored that size engine for long enough for the 302 to stay in production long enough for people to figure out how to make it perform. The only other classic Ford engine I can recall is the 300 cubic inch straight-6 truck engine which had massive torque and made the 302 Windsor look pitiful as a truck engine, though it had no top end and would have been a failure as a car engine.
Meanwhile, look at the excellent engines that GM has produced over the years, engines that are widely accepted as classics, like the 350 Chevy, the 400 Pontiac, the entire LS line of engines, … not to mention, of course, the 455 Olds, which was a *beast* (my Dad had one of those guys in an Olds 98, with the 4-barrel carb, and while that boat got 5mpg, when you stomped on the gas it *went*!).
My Dad was a Ford man, mostly because his ’59 Ford, while butt-ugly, ran forever and was finally sold to someone at 230,000 miles because the reverse gear had gone out on the gearbox. The guy he sold it to fixed the reverse gear and it was still going years later. But those 1970′s Fords were *awful*. Terrible, terrible engines in terrible, terrible cars. But terrorist? Hrm.
Tux -
Ford has its headquarters in Dearborn – home the the largest Arab-speaking community in the U.S. Coincidence?!? Hmmmm.
Besides, all the gas tank and rear-end collision fires n Ford vehicles over the decades have to count for something.
JzB