Ford has created some awesome cars and concepts over its 121-year history — and it’s curating the best examples in its U.S. heritage fleet.
When you’re an automaker that’s been around for a little while, it’s not uncommon to curate some of your most iconic vehicles into an expansive collection. Ford’s done that with a Europe and Australia, but interestingly, it hasn’t assembled such an official heritage collection in the United States…until now. This week, Ford Motor Company revealed part of its sizable U.S. Heritage Fleet at its world headquarters in Michigan, showing off some of the coolest and most impactful vehicles and concepts over its history.
In the “Heritage Vault”, as Ford calls it, there are a range of special projects, performance vehicles, media communications and marketing cars and plenty of one-off concepts that, at least to some extent, inspired actual production cars or design ideas through the years.
Ford CEO Jim Farley tasked Heritage Brand Manager Ted Ryan with curating the U.S. Heritage Fleet, which has since expanded to nearly 200 vehicles. Time capsules like a replica 1913 Model T join other important or innovative vehicles through the decades like a 1938 V-8 Ambulance, multiple iterations of the Mustang (including the 2000 SVT Cobra R, shown above), and concepts like the 2001 Forty-Nine concept, a 2004 concept for a “new” Bronco and a 2006 Lincoln MKR concept, showing off design elements and technology that would eventually make its way into production cars near the end of the 2000s and into the 2010s.
Naturally, it’s not just cars, either, as Ford is one of the largest truck manufacturers in the business. Decades before the current F-150 Lightning hit the scene, the company brought an electric Ranger pickup to market in 1997. It never reached the buying public like the Lightning, of course, as most of the vehicles in its five-year run were leased for fleet use (much like the original Toyota RAV4 EV).
You don’t capture minds and hearts with simply practical low-volume production vehicles or one-offs, though. You do it through going berserk with styling, like Ford did with the Airstream concept below, or setting up a V-10-powered Mustang that can pull even crazier burnouts than the standard 4.6-liter GT models, shown above. The idea with this Mustang was to create a car that could take on the Dodge Viper, though what we actually ended up seeing in production was the fifth-generation Mustang, and down the line, its GT500 (and GT500KR) variants.
As for the Airstream, Ford worked with the eponymous trailer company to create a futuristic looking van of sorts, complete with a plug-in hybrid powertrain powered by a battery pack and hydrogen fuel cell, so you’d have a zero-emissions vehicle as well as a self-powering camper van with a funky looking interior, swiveling seats and asymmetric doors.
Ford says its Heritage Fleet isn’t just a museum piece.
While these vehicles offer a look through the automaker’s history, Ford insists this isn’t “just a static display”. Instead, part of its mission is to be a springboard for engineers, designers, product development teams and the company’s communications teams to draw inspiration for its future models.
The automaker says in its announcement: “How does a company with over a century of automotive history stay fresh and innovative? For Ford, the answer lies within its Heritage Fleet, actively used by design and development teams to spark new ideas and push the boundaries of automotive engineering. This is more than just nostalgia; it’s about learning from the past to build a better future.”
We’ve been reliving a bit of Ford’s early history ourselves over the past several months, as you can check out below:
