Hmm, my first Ford, a '75 302C Ford Fairmont (Falcon) station wagon/estate I bought (well actually 'swapped', for a case of beer) in my last year of school. The stock 2 barrel carb had melted over a few hot Australian summers, but I found a 500 cfm Holley to replace it with, so learned about float levels, jets and rebuilding. Ended up changing the engine when the air cleaner bolt broke in two (one piece went down the intake, jamming a valve and cracking the block). Built a 5.8 litre version in the lounge room whilst mum was away on holiday. Added a 750cfm 4 barrel at that point. All carbs were second hand so I was rebuilding quite a lot.

That Ford car, he was a monster. 1900kg of iron, no alloy except the alloy steel the 4 Barrell Holley carb was made from; a bullet proof, iron cased 4 speed 'top loader' gearbox, 9-inch diff, 2 way tailgate that I had trouble lifting when I took it off. They built over a million of this model alone (for Australia this is a lot), and there was three produced on this floorpan/platform. They threw away their competitive advantage when they decided to stop producing the cars that sold really well in Australia, and made things worse by trying to kill V8s off in 1983. That decision had been made sometime earlier, as they effectively stopped development of V8 powerplants in 1977. They never gave them alloy bits, fuel injection or 4 valve heads, the oil crisis driving their thinking. It meant they lost all the marketing cache they could have used from the success of Mad Max. They re-introduced them due to a lack of appropriate replacement powerplants (they lacked the creativity to build even a mild turbo six like BMW had been doing for years and years at that point.

Realising that the engineers had the engineering solutions, not the management teams, Ford's Australian management left the engineers alone and turned their focus on their design teams (as did the rest of FoMoCo management internationally). They proceeded to destroy the look and feel of almost every model they were planning to make, and collected their bonuses whilst sending the company broke over the next 2 decades.

They simply failed to listen to the staff, and failed to figure out why decisions like the one about the V8s were being made (and reversed) by people that didn't know how. Meanwhile BMW listen to staff, build great cars, but caught the same 'control freak' approach and hired Bangle to run the design team. They lost their Italian flair and still struggle to get the designs ahead of the pack, and lost a lot of ground to VW/Audi amongst others.