Ford's Autobahn to Success

Prosperous West Germany's most heated industrial race has pitted General Motors' sprightly Opel against front-running Volkswagen for dominance of the burgeoning auto market.

Opel has been doing pretty well: it has jumped from 14.3% to 21.1% of the German market since 1952 (v. Volkswagen's 32.5%). It has just discovered, however, that while pursuing Volkswagen it will have to keep a sharp eye on the rearview mirror. Reason: Ford's German subsidiary is coming up fast from the rear. Fortified by new and attractive models, heavy investment and good management, Ford has captured 19.6% of the German market with its Taunus cars, pulling to within honking distance of Opel and bringing the two U.S.-owned companies closer to domination of Germany's auto market. Last week Ford announced that its passenger-car sales in Germany through April were 43% higher than in 1964.

High Riding. Ford's recent sales spurt is largely the result of a $40 million remodeling job last fall on its medium-price Taunus models (price: $1,689 to $2,330), which were handsomely restyled, given more powerful engines and equipped with front-wheel disk brakes.

The model change has actually pushed Ford ahead of Opel and VW in medium-priced sales. Ford's low-priced Taunus ($1,417 for a four-door sedan), virtually unchanged since its introduction in 1962, is behind both the small Opel and VW's familiar beetle in sales, but it still accounts for 35% of Ford's German production.

To keep Taunus sales rising, Ford has poured $450 million into its German subsidiary since 1948, has increased its daily production capacity to 2,050 cars, nearly six times as great as in 1956. Although it opened a huge, 700-car-a-day Taunus plant only last year in Genk, Belgium, Ford is already trying to increase its production there and has sent agents crisscrossing Europe seeking a site for still another Taunus assembly plant.

Low Visibility. The man in charge of Ford's expansion in Germany is Robert Layton, 41, a native Berliner who fled Hitler's Germany in 1938. Layton studied accounting in England, later became a U.S. citizen, was hired by Ford as a financial analyst in 1950. In 1957, he was sent to Cologne as top financial executive for Ford's German subsidiary, soon became Chairman John Andrews' key aide. The two presided over a steady rise in both Taunus production (from 67,254 vehicles in 1957 to 395,498 last year) and market share.

Andrews and Layton still work as a team: Layton was made Ford's German chief in February when Andrews was called to Detroit to become Ford's European vice president.

To allay German fears of excessive foreign control, Layton has continued Ford's policy of keeping American influence at "low visibility." Of the 35,500 Ford Taunus employees, only 23 are Americans. To reassure his engineers that he can see beyond his accountant's ledger, Layton picks a new Taunus every night from the Cologne assembly plant, drives it to his suburban home, returns it the next morning with a meticulous check list of complaints and suggestions. Layton's optimism about autos is equal to Detroit's. "The European car market in 1964 was 6,000,000 vehicles," he says. "We proceed on the assumption that by 1970 the market will be 8,000,000."

Layton hopes to proceed by widening the inroads that Ford has made in the German low-and medium-price fields, has no intention of following Opel into the luxury-car market dominated by Mercedes. "We would have to wrestle customers away from established makes," he says, "and sales would not be big enough to justify development and production costs." German customers with luxury tastes can nonetheless shop in Taunus showrooms. Some 1,500 have already paid between $4,000 and $5,000 for the T-5, Ford's German designation for the Mustang.

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