The Ford Taunus P1 is a small family car which was produced by Ford Germany from 1952 until 1962. It was marketed as the Ford Taunus 12M, and, between 1955 and 1959, as the larger-engined Ford Taunus 15M. The company produced a succession of Ford Taunus 12M models until 1970, as the name was applied to a succession of similarly sized cars, but the first Taunus 12M models, based on the company's Taunus Project 1 (P1), remained in production only until 1962. In that year the Taunus P1 series was replaced by the Taunus P4 series.
At its launch, the car placed Ford ahead of the pack, being unusually modern in terms of the bits that showed. It was one of the first new cars to appear in Germany since before the war, and featured a radical ponton format “three box” body as pioneered (at least in Germany) by the 1949 Borgward. The three-box car body format would soon become mainstream, but when the Ford Taunus 12M appeared in 1952 competitor manufacturers including Opel, Volkswagen and Auto Union were still competing with models based closely on designs originating in the 1930s.
Globe Taunus / „Weltkugeltaunus“ (1952–1959)
Development
The planning for Ford Germany's new ponton bodied passenger car began in 1949. Several aspects of the car's development reflected the advantages and the disadvantages of running a business with management decisions necessarily split between two continents at a time when even international telephone calls needed to be pre-booked.
The original plan for the strikingly modern design came from Ford in the USA who drew up a proposal based on the ponton format Champion model introduced to the US auto-market a few years earlier by Studebaker. The Studebaker design had already proved highly influential on the domestic programs of mainstream US auto-makers. Cologne based production engineers adapted the US proposal for the German market. The Studebaker featured a large roundel directly above the front grill on which was displayed the propeller of an airplane. The Ford Project 1 also featured a prominent roundel at the front of the car, but in place of the Studebaker's propeller design, the Ford roundel featured a hemispherical depiction of half a globe. This bold and unusual decoration led to the new car becoming known as the „Weltkugeltaunus“ (Globe Taunus).
The proposal from Ford in America called for a monocoque construction, following the lead (in Germany) of the 1937 Opel Olympia. Ford of Germany had no experience of this construction method, having spent most of the 1940s concentrating on building light trucks. Project 1's predecessor, the Ford Taunus designed in the 1930s, had had its body built by Ambi Budd, an independent specialist pressed steel body builder in Berlin until 1948, and after the Berlin firm had its surviving plant crated up and shipped to the Soviet Union, Ford had in 1948 been driven to having Ford Taunus bodies produced by competitors and specialists from northern Germany, Volkswagen and Karmann. Ford's Cologne management sought cooperation from other German auto-makers with developing the processes necessary for producing the monocoque Project 1 model, but the other German auto-makers had priorities of their own, and in the end it was with support from Ford of France that the production lines for German Ford's project 1 were set up at the company's Cologne plant. In due course, and not before a certain amount of confusion concerning the naming of the car, Ford's Project 1 was released to the market as the Ford Taunus 12M. It proved a success. By the time the half globe was removed from the car's nose, 247,174 of the 12M version had been sold along with 127,942 of the subsequently introduced Ford Taunus 15Ms.
The name
The naming of the car is another area which may have been complicated by the way that responsibilities were shared between different management teams in two continents divided by an eight-hour time difference and the Atlantic Ocean. The immediate postwar era was seen as a new beginning for a newly divided Germany with, in the west, new borders, a new constitution and a new political class. The monocoque bodied new model for 1952 also represented a new beginning for Ford, so identifying it as Ford of Germany's Project 1 (P1) was evidently uncontentious. Ford Taunus 12M/15M production (units): 1952 30,650 1953 35,888 1954 42,631 1955 58,456 1956 64,872 1957 50,734 1958 29,688 1959 52,648 1960 94,408 1961 61,474 1962 34,014
Totals ( saloons/sedans & estates/kombis): 1952-1959 Taunus 12M 1.2L: 215,265 1954-1958 Taunus 15M 1.5L: 134,127 1959-1962 Taunus 12M 1.2L: 126,581 1959-1962 Taunus 12M 1.5L: 69,191