More Top Picks Best Tool Bags For Mechanics
player ready...Ford Motors is still trying to catch the mini-van that got away 10 years ago.
Had the No. 2 automaker been a little less myopic in the ’70s, 1994 might mark the Ford mini-van’s 10th anniversary. Instead, Chrysler gets the honors for a vehicle that has been a moving target for virtually every automaker in the world, racking up its 4 millionth sale in November.
“I don’t think there’s any question that the mini-van’s impact on the market has been monumental,” says industry analyst Jim Wangers of the AMCI consulting firm in Vista, Calif. “Chrysler is to be commended for not only bringing it to market but giving it good quality.”
Despite repeated efforts, no other company has come close to Chrysler’s 46 percent market share.
General Motors’ first efforts were the truck-like Chevrolet Astro/GMC Safari. Later GM presented the futuristic Chevrolet Lumina APV/Pontiac Trans Sport/Oldsmobile Silhouette trio. Chrysler execs privately chuckled at the GM efforts because their market research showed the public would not accept the plastic “dustbuster” design.
“I’m very critical of General Motors for not getting themselves competitive,” Wangers said. “They have not taken the steps to provide a competitive vehicle.”
But in 1994, Ford hopes to narrow the gap with three mini-vans aimed at Chrysler’s nearly 500,000 sales.
“The ultimate game plan is to be the van master,” says Woody Haines, assistant manager for truck platforms at Ford in Dearborn, Mich. “It’s the only segment we compete in where we’re not the leaders.”
The biggest threat to Chrysler will be the Windstar, a front-drive vehicle with dual airbags and car-like characteristics. Windstar is scheduled to roll off Oakville, Ontario, Canada, assembly lines this month with a 1995 designation.
Complementing the Windstar will be more than 100,000 Mercury Villagers, an upscale Ford model that has a twin in the Nissan Quest. The rest of Ford’s mini-van sales will come from the Aerostar, a larger, rear-drive vehicle that ends its eight-year run as a 1994 model.
“The Aerostar’s been very popular,” Haines says. “It’s not that it’s been a disappointment. It’s just that the state-of-the-art has moved away from it. You have to be the state-of-the-art-it’s still a growing market.”
The Aerostar represented Ford’s entry into the mini-van market two years after Chrysler. Unlike the K-car-based Dodge Caravans and Plymouth Voyagers, the Aerostar was a rear-drive vehicle derived from the small-truck platform.
In the late ’70s the idea for Ford’s original mini/max died in the hands of budget cutters who ignored its vast market potential, according to Eric Taub’s book “Taurus, The Making of the Car that Saved Ford.”
When Henry Ford II later fired Lee Iacocca, he transformed the “father of the Mustang” into the savior of Chrysler. As chief executive at the troubled No. 3 automaker, Iacocca gave the mini-van a green light and $500 million in development funding.
“The company was nearly belly-up,” recalls Glenn Gardner, who was Dodge Truck planning manager at the time and now heads the large car platform team. “The (engineering, research and development) and the tooling for the plant was half-a-billion dollars.”
“We knew instantly we had a home run,” he says. “We did very little advertising because the whole plant was sold out.” And the mood at Chrysler changed dramatically.
“This whole company was fired up. We said, `There’s something that we can thumb our noses at the Japanese over. This little company can really do something.’ “
Chrysler advertises itself as “the mini-van company” while making inroads elsewhere with new cars such as the cab-forward LH models, a new full-size Dodge Ram pickup and a new subcompact Dodge Neon.
“We’ve had seven consecutive monthly sales records with mini-vans,” says Chrysler spokesman Alex Tsigdinos. “We’ve also had more than half-a-million sales for the first time in a model year.”
The success of the upscale Chrysler Town and Country-27 consecutive monthly sales records-indicates the growth at the upper end of the market, which Ford tried to tap with the Mercury Villager.
More Top Picks Why Do My Eyes Hurt After A Day At The Screen
“The stress for us has been continuous innovation,” says Tsigdinos.