John Arthur Oldfield (13 January 1937 - September 2002) [1] was a British engineer, and a former senior Ford executive and designer.
He was born in Stepney. His family moved soon after to Essex, and he had 4 younger siblings. He was the son of George Oldfield and Alice Bunker, who married in Essex in 1935. He attended the Cranfield Institute of Technology (Cranfield University), gaining an MSc.
He joined Ford in 1958, at the age of 21. He became head of the £3bn design project [2] for the Ford Mondeo (CDW27) in May 1986 from Ford Dunton, which was launched in March 1993 at the Geneva Motor Show. The car was made at Genk Body & Assembly in Genk, Belgium, which was to produce around 350,000 a year. At its peak, the Mondeo design team at the Dunton Technical Centre and Merkenich in Germany had 800 engineers. He was head of Mondeo design for six years up to its launch. The design for the Mondeo was agreed at the Merkenich Technical Centre in Cologne. American teams worked on the air conditioning and the automatic gearboxes, and European teams worked on the manual gearboxes. The Ford Zeta engine was developed for the Mondeo.
Ford at Dagenham had lost production of the Sierra in 1989 (moving to Genk), although it still made the Ford Fiesta (third generation) (its 7,000 workers were making around 240,000 a year in the early 1990s). The Sierra would sell 1.3m in the UK.
He became head of New Products at Ford of Europe in the early 1990s. Ford in the UK is headquartered at Warley, Essex, off the B186, south of Brentwood.
In February 1994 he became Executive Chairman of Aston Martin in Newport Pagnell, then owned by Ford. Under his chairmanship, production of hand-crafted Aston Martins went from 150 a year to 700 a year. He oversaw the development of the Aston Martin DB7.
He retired on 22 October 1995, due to cancer, having worked for Ford for 37 years; he had been Executive Chairman for twenty months. Inside the automobile industry he was known as Mr Mondeo.
In his later years, he lived at Boreham, north-east of Chelmsford. He died in the City of Chelmsford district in 2002, due to motor neurone disease.
The Ford Sierra is a mid-size car or large family car manufactured and marketed by Ford Europe from 1982-1993, designed by Uwe Bahnsen, Robert Lutz and Patrick le Quément — and noted for its aerodynamic styling producing a drag coefficient of 0.34, a significant improvement over its predecessors.
The automotive industry in the United Kingdom is now best known for premium and sports car marques including Aston Martin, Bentley, Caterham Cars, Daimler, Jaguar, Lagonda, Land Rover, Lister Cars, Lotus, McLaren, MG, Mini, Morgan and Rolls-Royce. Volume car manufacturers with a major presence in the UK include Nissan, Toyota and Vauxhall Motors. Commercial vehicle manufacturers active in the UK include Alexander Dennis, Ford, IBC Vehicles, Leyland Trucks and London Electric Vehicle Company.
The Ford Mondeo is a large family car manufactured by Ford since 1993. The first Ford model declared as a "world car", the Mondeo was intended to consolidate several Ford model lines worldwide. The Mondeo nameplate is derived from the Latin word mundus, meaning "world". Thus Mondeo can be viewed as a Latin-derived brandname from multiple languages: Bourguignon monde, English monde, Esperanto mondo, Franco-Provençal mondo, French monde, Friulian mond, Ido mondo, Istriot mondo, Italian mondo, Lombard mond, Occitan mond, Romansh mond, Venetian móndo, Walloon monde, all meaning "world". For its first two generations, the Mondeo was produced using the CDW27 platform, with the third-generation model shifting to the EUCD platform. The fourth-generation models use the CD4 platform, and the fifth-generation use the C2 platform.
The Premier Automotive Group (PAG) was an organizational division within the Ford Motor Company formed in 1999 to oversee the business operations of Ford's high-end automotive marques. The PAG was gradually dismantled from 2006 to 2011 with the divestiture of its constituent brands.
David Pender Richards is the chairman of Prodrive, chairman of Motorsport UK, former chairman of Aston Martin, a former team principal of the BAR and Benetton Formula One motor racing teams and as a co-driver, World Rally Champion in 1981. He lives with his wife, Karen, in Warwickshire and has three children. In the 2005 New Year Honours List Richards was appointed a CBE for his services to motorsport and in 2017 was inducted into the Motor Sport Hall of Fame and received the Spirit of Le Mans award from the Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO). In 2019 he received the Autocar Outstanding Leader Award.
Nicholas Richard Fry is the former Chief Executive Officer of the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team, having previously served in similar roles at previous incarnations of the company.
The Ford Galaxy is a seven-seater car produced by Ford of Europe from June 1995 to April 2023. Considered in the motor industry to be a large multi-purpose vehicle (MPV), it was the first Ford-brand MPV produced and marketed outside of North America, the model line is currently in its third generation. Sharing its platform architecture with the Ford Mondeo, the Galaxy was developed alongside the Ford S-Max; the model line is slotted between the Connect and Custom variants of the Ford Tourneo/Transit model family.
Boreham is a village and civil parish, in Essex, England. The parish is in the City of Chelmsford and Chelmsford Parliament constituency. The village is approximately 3.7 miles (6.0 km) northeast from the county town of Chelmsford.
Ford of Europe GmbH is a subsidiary company of Ford Motor Company founded in 1967 in Cork, Ireland, with headquarters in Cologne, Germany.
Walter Leopold Arthur Hayes was an English journalist, and later public relations executive for Ford.
The Ford Sierra RS Cosworth is a high-performance version of the Ford Sierra that was built by Ford Europe from 1986 to 1992. It was the result of a Ford Motorsport project with the purpose of producing an outright winner for Group A racing in Europe.
Richard Parry-Jones was a British engineer. He was the Group Vice-President of Global Product Development, Chief Technical Officer, and Head of Global R&D Operations at Ford Motor Company. He retired in December 2007.
Andrew Charles Palmer is an English automotive executive and engineer. He has been described as the 'Godfather of EVs' due to his work launching the Nissan Leaf in 2010 whilst COO at the Japanese company. Palmer is also known for launching Aston Martin's first SUV, the DBX, and first mid-engined sports car, Valkyrie, during his tenure as CEO from 2014 to 2020. Palmer was previously CEO and Executive Vice-chairman of electric bus and van company, Switch. He resigned from this role in 2022. In addition, Palmer is founder and CEO of Palmer Automotive Ltd, chairman of Optare plc, a non-executive director of Ashok Leyland Ltd, and Chairman of InoBat, a Slovakian developer of electric vehicle 'intelligent' batteries.
The Dunton Campus is a major automotive research and development facility located in Dunton Wayletts, Laindon, Essex, United Kingdom, which is owned and operated by Ford Motor Company. Ford Dunton houses the main design team of Ford of Europe alongside its Merkenich Technical Centre in Cologne, Germany. With the closure of Ford's Warley site in September 2019, the staff from the UK division of Ford Motor Credit Company and Ford's UK Sales and Marketing departments have moved to the Dunton site. As of November 2019, Dunton had around 4,000 staff working at the site.
Genk Body & Assembly was a Ford Motor Company automobile factory in Genk, Belgium, just over an hour to the west of the company's European head office in Cologne, Germany. The site spanned 6,135,630 square feet. The plant employed approx 4,300 workers in 2014.
The Ford Mondeo I (first generation) is a mid-size car that was produced by Ford, beginning on 23 November 1992, with sales beginning on 22 March 1993. It is also known as the Mk I Mondeo; the 1996 facelift versions are usually designated Mk II. Available as a four-door saloon, a five-door hatchback, and a five-door estate, all models for the European market were produced at Ford's plant in the Belgian city of Genk. In December 1992, Autocar published a section on the Mondeo, and how it would conquer rivals.
David Lewis John Price is a British engineer, and a former senior executive at Ford of Europe and Aston Martin.
Rose Mary Farenden is a Northern Irish mechanical engineer who was the project manager for the launch of the Ford Focus in 1998.
Ford Ireland is the Irish subsidiary of the United States-based automaker Ford Motor Company. With an assembly plant for motor vehicles, it was part of the automotive industry in Ireland.
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