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. In 1970 he was the Ford chassis engineering manager at Dunton. [2]
He became head of the £3bn design project [3] 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, McLaren, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Jaguar, Range Rover, Mini and Lotus. Specialised sports car companies include: Ariel, BAC, Morgan, Caterham, AC Cars, Gordan Murray, TVR, Noble, Radical, Ginetta, Ultima Sports, Westfield, Lister, Arash and David Brown. Volume car manufacturers with a major presence in the UK include: Nissan, Toyota, Mini and Vauxhall. Commercial vehicle manufacturers active in the UK include Alexander Dennis, Dennis Eagle, IBC Vehicles, Leyland Trucks, TEVVA and the London Electric Vehicle Company.
The Ford Mondeo is a 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". 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 and chairman of Motorsport UK. He is former chairman of Aston Martin and a former team principal of the BAR and Benetton Formula One teams.
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.
Ford of Europe GmbH is a subsidiary company of Ford Motor Company founded in 1967 in Cork, Ireland, with headquarters in Cologne, Germany.
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.
Dunton Wayletts or Dunton is hamlet and former civil parish in the Borough of Basildon in Essex, England. It lies on the western outskirts of the borough's main town of Basildon, adjoining the suburb of Laindon.
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. Palmer was appointed Interim CEO of PodPoint in July 2023.
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.
The fourth generation of the Ford Mondeo, is a range of mid-size cars produced by Ford from 2013 to 2022. Developed under the model code CD391, it is a rebadged variant of the American-market Fusion sold in Europe, Latin America, China and Australia. Revealed at the 2012 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan, the Mondeo is based on a new iteration of Ford's C/D platform, which it shares with the Galaxy and S-Max large MPVs. The Fusion had started production in 2012, which was about one year before the Mondeo had. At its launch, it served as the flagship model for Ford's lineup in China, and was tested on Chinese roads in 2013.
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. It formerly operated an assembly plant for motor vehicles and was part of the automotive industry in Ireland.
David William Thursfield is a British businessman, and a former chief executive at Ford; he was also jailed.
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