Ford just added 100 photos of concept cars hidden for decades to its online archive
The hunt to find rare car photos of early prototypes, hidden for decades, just got a little easier.
Merry Christmas.
But be cautious about spreading the word. In January, when Ford Motor Co. did a photo dump of vintage F-Series pickup truck photos, fans crashed the computer system. The tech team immediately fixed the issue and took action to keep a shutdown from happening again by doubling capacity.
This time, Ford is revealing 100 new concept car images, including 45 new vehicles, to total 378 unique concept vehicles online. It looks like a study in futuristic automotive car design executed decades ago. Overall, the Ford Heritage Vault now hosts 1,844 concept car images from 1896 to 2021. Plus, the site includes all the old news releases and brochures for the concepts.
"Those are what you can't find anywhere," Ford archivist Ted Ryan told the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network.
Wild ideas presented in some of these vehicles would one day become commonplace.
"The designers were given free rein to imagine what 'could be' rather than what was current. Many of the innovations that were showcased often did come to be," Ryan said. "The X-100 (in 1953) had 100 different innovations, and many, like the rain-sensing windshield wipers, telephone in the car, auto-sensing high and low beam headlights and the navigation systems, all worked their way into our everyday life. These all sprang from the imagination of the designers who created the concepts."
Concept cars have long been the way for automakers to showcase new technologies, designs or flights of creative fantasy for the automotive designers, Ryan said.
"Concepts were also often the centerpiece of the auto shows circuit and would travel the country (and sometimes world) showcasing the best of Detroit," Ryan said. "The Lincoln Futura was a working concept that wowed the country at the shows before we sold it to George Barris for $1 and he turned it into the Batmobile!"
But those images have rarely been seen as years pass, Ryan said. "We changed that by loading more than 1,600 photos and brochures of over 300 different concept cars from Ford, Lincoln and Mercury into the Ford Heritage Vault. The ‘unveiling’ of the brochures and images offers a major snapshot of avant-garde automotive creativity Ford Motor Co. has offered since the quadricycle rolled down the road in 1896."
Looking back to the future
The site includes one-of-a-kind vehicles including the:
◾ 1967 Comuta, an early electric vehicle prototype.
◾ 1958 Nucleon – a car designed to run on nuclear power.
◾ 1961 Gyron – Designed by Syd Mead, who later went on to be the set designer for the movie “Bladerunner.”
◾ 1964 Aurora – A station wagon concept with an L-shaped sofa and an early navigation system.
"They are all from the glory period of the concepts," Ryan said.
‘Don't blame us’
Excitement for accessing vintage car images started in June 2022, when the Ford Heritage Archive first granted free access to images of classic Ford, Lincoln and Edsel vehicles and old sales brochures (including for Mustang, Bronco and F-150).
The site wowed collectors, gearheads and nostalgia junkies. During the first two weeks, 64,000 users generated 750,000 online searches of the Ford Heritage Vault.
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Top Gear, Britain's bestselling car magazine, ran a story on Dec. 8, 2022, that warned: "Don’t blame us if you end up wasting your day trawling through a trove of classic Fords."
Public response has only heated up since then. Ryan noted:
◾ In November alone, Ford tracked 1,548,937 public searches and 356,239 image downloads.
◾ To date, more than 300,000 users from 180 countries have conducted 18.823 million searches and downloaded 4.777 million items.
◾ The site now has more than 15,000 items including more than 9,000 images and 5,000 documents dating from 1896-2022. Product brochures are written in French, English, Korean and Chinese.
A vault that unlocks memories too
Ryan said, "I also got a very sweet note from a user who really brought home the impact cars have on our lives and why a site like the vault not only serves as a mechanism to see cool things or do research, but also, at its core, allows people to unlock memories."
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He shared contents of the note from Christine Le Couilliard, of London, England, (with her permission) that said, "I have just searched ‘Ford Mondeo blue’ in the Ford Heritage Vault site and up popped a trip down memory lane for me. That car was one of the best cars my husband and I had in our early years which we spent living in Sydney in Australia. We loved it so much that we bought the same car when we moved back to the UK a few years later!"
Ford has rolled out access and new vehicle images for various countries, with the U.S. being first in June 2022. After the site launched in Britain, Ryan said the company saw 500,000 searches and 125,000 downloads.
Go online to fordheritagevault.com to find images of prototypes and vintage cars, trucks, news releases and product material found nowhere else.
Contact Phoebe Wall Howard: 313-618-1034 or phoward@freepress.com. Follow her on X @phoebesaid.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Ford Heritage Vault online archive adds concept car photos
