1967-1971 Ford Thunderbird

A huge bird emblem spread across the eggcrate-textured grille was a clue as to the direction of the 1967 Ford Thunderbird design, although the Thunderbird's traditional hood scoop faded into a mere power bulge.

The most-wanted of the 1967 Thunderbirds was the Landau hardtop, which sold 37,000.

Out back, the trunk lid gently echoed the "dog-bone" theme of 1964-1966, above a single huge taillight that stretched from fender to fender. Individual sections still lit sequentially to signal a turn.

A bright molding along the bottom edge of the body visually connected the front and rear bumpers. Vent windows vanished, and the rear quarter glass now retracted horizontally into the roof pillar for more rattle-free operation.

Thunderbird fanciers would find more design continuity inside. Flow-through ventilation, an innovation in 1964, was continued in the new generation. The dash housed more conventional instruments but still swept into a massive center console, and the rear seats continued to wrap around at the outboard edges. The swing-away steering wheel now tilted as well. Optional lights on an overhead console warned if a door was open, fuel was low, or a seat belt had been left unfastened.

A renewed interest in safety brought pliable rubber grab handles, recessed sun visors, and even shoulder belts, one year ahead of federal mandate. Tiny fins on the front fenders were made of soft rubber too, and then deleted entirely shortly after the start of production.

The 1967 Thunderbird Landau's interior featured a swing-away steering wheel and bucket seats.

As before, the Thunderbird lineup began with a painted-roof hardtop and progressed up to a "Landau" with vinyl top and ersatz landau irons. The latter surrendered the unique, blind-quarter roofline it had worn in 1966 and now frankly looked a little awkward, as the smooth new body lines left no logical break point for the vinyl covering.

Still, Landaus outsold hardtops more than two-to-one. The convertible, whose sales had faded more or less steadily since 1960, was discontinued. Ford had developed another very different Thunderbird variant to replace it.

A four-door Thunderbird wasn't an entirely new idea. As early as September 1955, Ford designers had modeled a 1958 "Squarebird" as a close-coupled four-door hardtop. In May 1964, still early in the 1967 program, Boyer's crew worked up a full-size rendering of "their" Thunderbird as a four-door hardtop, with short rear doors, wide rear roof pillars and "black cherry" paintwork.

One day Bordinat brought Lee Iacocca (then general manager of Ford Division) in to see it. Wrote Boyer: "Iacocca's cigar glowed brightly as he took it all in and, of course, we were not unaware that black cherry or candy apple red were Lee's favorite colors. ... [He said,] 'Let's get that one nailed down. That's our convertible replacement.' Gene looked back at us with a discreet wink. ..."

The four-door sold 24,967 copies in 1967, or 32 percent of Thunderbird production. The convertible hadn't broken 10 percent since 1963.

In the original drawing, the rear doors were hinged conventionally, at the B-pillar. Ford engineer James K. Wagner recalled "some financial types joking" that the four-door Thunderbird could be a Lincoln if the designers would just "flip the door handle around." The production version did feature rear-hinged doors like the Continental's.

But on the Thunderbird, a section of the roof's broad sail panel extended into what would have been window area and opened with the door, creating an even more close-coupled appearance. The standard vinyl top and landau bars helped camouflage the cut line. And the Thunderbird's frameless door glass closed against a slim center pillar. The Continental's combination of reverse-hinged doors and pillarless construction had been "nothing but trouble," said Halderman, and Ford engineers had no desire to repeat the experience.

For more on the 1967 Ford Thunderbird, continue to the next page.

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The 1967 Ford Thunderbird was as thoroughly re-engineered as it was redesigned. Body-on-frame construction, based on the full-size Ford platform, replaced the unit-body arrangement that the 1958-1966 Thunderbirds had shared with the big Lincolns.

Sporting goods dealer Abercrombie & Fitch commissioned approximately seven lavish Apollos based on the 1967 Landau hardtop.

The new Thunderbird borrowed nearly all of the big Ford's running gear, including its all-coil suspension and even the front and rear sections of its frame. Side rails were shortened to give the Thunderbird a sportier 114.7-inch wheelbase in two-door form, and 117.2 inches for the four-door. This was a bit longer than the approximately 113-inch wheelbase of the 1958-1966 models, but still handily compact alongside the 119-inch Toronado and Riviera.

Inside the special Abercrombie & Fitch Apollos, a writing table and lamp served passengers.

Incredibly, the bigger, body-on-frame Thunderbird still weighed 138 pounds less (in two-door form) than its unit-bodied predecessor. The only items carried over from its previous incarnation were its standard 315-horsepower, 390-cubic-inch V-8 and optional 345-horsepower 428-cubic-inch engine.

The changeover to body-on-frame construction must have complicated operations at the Wixom, Michigan, plant where Ford assembled the new Thunderbirds on the same lines that still built the unit-body Lincoln. Thunderbird frames started upside-down along an all-new frame line; suspension parts were lowered onto them. Then a hoist lifted the frames, turned them over, and fed them to a suspended conveyor that transported them to final assembly, where they were lowered to floor level and mixed with Lincoln unit-bodies riding on special fixtures.

A telephone with deck-lid antenna was among the features of the special Abercrombie & Fitch 1967 Thunderbird.

Engines and drivelines were installed and then, as before, Lincolns and Thunderbirds were separated and sent to their respective trim lines. Both cars still received a single electrostatic primer, followed by a spray primer, then three color coats. And just like the Continental, every Thunderbird was given a 12-mile road test before the plant released it.

Car Life called the 1967 Thunderbird "slicker, quieter, and smoother than any Bird that preceded it." But the more skeptical editors of Car and Driver complained that the bigger Thunderbird had become "a sharply styled, slightly smaller Galaxie with all the trimmings ... . " They liked the more functional new interior, but criticized their four-door test car for poor visibility. "Once underway," they added, "the Thunderbird is just another big domestic car, with a wonderful penchant for silent 70-mph cruising speeds and handling with a heavy dose of understeer."

For more on Ford's decision not to use unit-body construction in the 1967 Thunderbird, see the next page.

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Forward-looking auto designers recognized the inherent and inevitable logic of giving the 1967 Ford Thunderbird unit-body construction. Nash and Hudson had already proven its viability, and Chrysler launched a massive effort to unitize most of its product line for 1960.

The unit-body assembly that served Thunderbird since 1958 was discarded for body-on-frame in 1967.

At Ford, body engineering director Henry Grebe believed that all Fords, Mercurys, and Lincolns would eventually convert to an integral body/frame. Not everyone in Dearborn agreed, however, and the company approached the unit body cautiously, converting one or two products at a time. Naturally, they began with the cars they thought could benefit most from the change.

Unit construction made sense for the first four-seat Thunderbird in 1958, allowing it to squeeze more interior room into a lower profile. Lincoln also switched over to unit construction for 1958, hoping that a technological edge over Cadillac might boost languishing sales.

Ford opened a new plant in Wixom, Michigan, as the exclusive assembly point for Thunderbirds and Lincolns, which shared cowls, windshields, and some other body hardware.

A unit body made sense for a small car as well, and so the compact Falcon of 1960 and mid-size Fairlane of 1962 were Ford's next two unitized products. But for the vitally important full-size line, Ford management hedged and ordered a conventionally constructed car to be developed in parallel with a unit-body version.

According to engineer Jim Wagner, these programs were well under way when the 1961 Pontiac appeared, with its relatively rigid body "nodal-point mounted" on a somewhat flexible perimeter frame. The Pontiac design promised unit-body strength with near-ideal sound isolation, so Ford enthusiastically adopted this best-of-both-worlds approach for the all-new 1965 full-size Ford and Mercury.

One could almost think of the 1965 Ford as a unitized (Ford used the term "rigidized") body with a full-length subframe to isolate the suspension and driveline. All 14 body mounts were located either in front of or behind the passenger compartment, which helped minimize noise, vibration, and harshness.

A famous advertisement claimed that the 1965 LTD rode more quietly than a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. That wasn't quite true: Tests had proven the Ford to be significantly more quiet, but the ad agency feared that no one would believe that and fudged the results to narrow the gap between the two cars.

"Given that success, it was a foregone conclusion that the company's large cars would follow the same course in the future," explained Wagner. Similar construction was applied to the Thunderbird for 1967, the Continental in 1970, and even the Torino in 1972.

See the next page to follow the Ford Thunderbird story into 1968-1969.

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Improvements and refinements followed for the 1968-1969 Ford Thunderbird. Ford's heavier-duty 429-cubic-inch V-8 replaced the 428 as the top-performance option; by the first of the year, the 390 was gone, too.

Federally mandated side marker lights, a new grille, and a smaller bumper identified 1968 Thunderbirds.

A preheated carburetor air system and some ignition modifications cleansed the exhaust to government standards. The standard front disc brakes now featured floating calipers, the windshield wipers swept parallel to each other, and Ford replumbed the vacuum headlight system so that a failure would leave the doors open, rather than closed. Squeeze-type inside door handles added safety and convenience.

For the first time, buyers could choose a bench seat in a Thunderbird. Again Ford was following General Motors's lead, as Riviera had offered standard three-across seating since 1966 and the Toronado just added bucket seats as an option in 1967. Fifty-seven percent of two-door Thunderbird buyers still preferred buckets, although 79 percent of four-door customers opted for the bench.

Otherwise, little had changed that the world could see, the most obvious exterior difference being the federally mandated side-marker lights. To keep the side of the car as clean as possible, the designers integrated the identifying "Thunderbird" script into the rear marker-light bezel and assigned the front light double duty as an optional cornering beacon.

A slimmer lower-body molding no longer ran the full length of the car. Finer-ribbed wheel covers tended to look as if they were spinning, even when they weren't.

The grille got considerably fussier, however, divided now into 32 box-like segments, with a little bird-in-a-box logo centered over each headlight door. At the rear, the bright panel across the taillights was turned black, and a wide bird-shaped badge replaced the Thunderbird lettering. Landaus sported pretend alligator skin on the roof. A four-door "town sedan" with a painted top was supposed to have appeared in January, but didn't.

Full-width taillights gave way to a pair of nearly rectangular lamps on the 1969 Ford Thunderbird.

The blind-quartered Thunderbird Landau coupe returned for 1969. Hardtop models retained their 1967-1968 roofline with small quarter windows. An electric sunroof, still a novelty on an American car, joined the options list. For the first time, bench seats outsold buckets on all three body styles.

The big bird emblem returned, too, to a cleaned-up grille, now divided into only eight segments. In the rear, individual taillights, separated by a single large backup light, fit into the nacelles formed by contour of the trunk lid (shades of 1964). The rear side-marker light shrank down to relative inconspicuousness and the rocker molding grew ribs.

Somewhere around this time, suspension revisions pulled all Thunderbirds closer to the ground, while two-door models only garnered stiffer springs, larger-diameter shocks, and a fatter anti-roll bar. (Both Car Life and Motor Trend reported these changes for 1969, although the Ford Master Parts Catalog for 1965-1972 shows the new part numbers arriving in 1968.)

Car Life tested a T-Bird in February, and found its handling still dominated by understeer -- although its braking performance from 80 mph was better "than all but a handful of cars sold in the U.S."

That same month, Motor Trend pitted a two-door Landau against a Mercury Marauder X-100, Buick Riviera, Oldsmobile Toronado, and Pontiac Grand Prix. Motor Trend judged the Thunderbird's handling "vastly improved" if not quite up to the standard of the Toronado and Grand Prix.

Yet, even with its stiffer underpinnings, the Thunderbird still beat all of its GM competitors for smooth ride and interior quiet. It out-braked them all (and the Marauder, too), offered the most complete instrumentation, and finished mid-pack in acceleration. "In our opinion," the editors concluded, "the best all-around car is the Thunderbird."

To learn about the 1970 Ford Thunderbird, continue to the next page.

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According to Wagner, Ford's grand plan for the 1970 Ford Thunderbird included an all-new Fairlane/Torino with a self-supporting body and compliant frame similar to the full-size Ford's. Dearborn appears to have also considered a new Thunderbird based on this mid-size platform. That idea certainly would have appealed to Semon E. "Bunkie" Knudsen, whom Henry Ford II hired as Ford Motor Company CEO in early 1968.

A lower, more rakish roofline and a prominent beak were the dominant features of the 1970 Thunderbird.

Having served as general manager of Pontiac and then Chevrolet, Bunkie was easily lured away from General Motors when he felt his career there had stalled. At Ford, he questioned the contradiction that the Thunderbird had become: a large but sporty prestige car offered through the company's mass-market division.

He knew that Pontiac was moving the slow-selling Grand Prix to a mid-size platform for 1969, and thought the Thunderbird might benefit from a similar change. Although no designer himself, he kibitzed liberally in the studios, pushing for his trademark "bold nose" front ends (the designers called them "Bunkie Beaks") and massive rear quarters.

He twisted engineering arms to allow stationary sheet metal ahead of the engine hood -- an idea favored at General Motors for design flexibility but previously banned by Ford engineers, who saw only extra seams to go awry during assembly.

He clashed bitterly with Lee Iacocca, who no doubt believed that he deserved Knudsen's job. After one particularly acerbic conflict in September 1969, Henry Ford II dispatched Knudsen to the unemployment line. But by then, Bunkie had left his mark on the Thunderbird.

Work on numerous other projects (the Maverick and 1969 full-size cars, the 1970 body-on-frame Continental, and the 1971 Pinto and Mustang) delayed the new Torino until 1972. For 1970, the Thunderbird retained its full-size platform and 1967-1969 body shell, even the same external skin for its doors and rear quarters.

But the designers gave it an all-new front end, with the pointed grille and exposed headlights that Knudsen wanted for the all-new car. Two-door models rode even lower now -- 1.4 inches lower -- thanks to a cut-down windshield and a fluid, semi-fastback roofline that did sacrifice a bit of headroom. The suspension was retuned for standard Goodrich radial tires, improving both ride and handling.

The radio antenna was buried in the windshield, the wipers disappeared beneath the trailing edge of the hood, electrical and vacuum systems were simplified, and the Thunderbirds now shared a sound insulation package with Lincoln's Continental Mark III personal coupe. Inside, both front and rear seats were reportedly improved, and the optional buckets gained integrated head restraints.

1970 Landau coupes lost their formal roof style -- and their landau bars -- but the name persisted for vinyl-topped Thunderbirds.

In keeping with the Thunderbird's sleeker, sportier appearance, the three-window body style was again shelved. Ford sales literature still referred to a two-door Landau, but this was just a two-door hardtop with a vinyl roof; it didn't even have landau bars. (Some sources do list a separate body code for the 1970 Landau, which would suggest some unique sheet metal, but no such roof -- or correspondingly shorter deck lid -- is listed in the Master Parts Catalog.)

Along with the new design, Ford instituted new testing procedures at Wixom. The 12-mile road test was eliminated, replaced by mechanized test stations within the plant. It lacked romance, but Ford said it eliminated driver judgment and saved time by keeping the cars closer to the repair stations while checking for defects.

Right off the assembly line, a water test enclosure checked for leaks, then a Merrill Aligner dynamically measured camber, caster, and toe-in with the car running on rollers at a simulated 50 mph. Seven Clayton chassis dynos checked both torque at the rear wheels and braking performance. Exhaust emissions were also measured on the dynos, and the transmission checked for smoothness. Testers even ran the air conditioning.

From there the new Thunderbirds proceeded to eight wind-noise cells, where a fixture sealed the trunklid and the interior was pressurized. Operators with stethoscopes checked around windows and doors for leakage. Then lights were checked in a "subdued lighting station" and the cars driven over a pit for leak inspection. Operators still selected 20 cars each day for road testing, and five of those were given a "shake-rattle" audit.

To read about changes for the 1971 Ford Thunderbird, continue to the next page.

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The blind-quarter Landau returned for 1971, and three bright horizontal bars across the grille distinguished 1971 Ford Thunderbird hard-tops and four-doors from the previous year's models.

Landaus accounted for more than half of the 36,055 1971 Ford Thunderbirds assembled.

Against this aging Thunderbird, General Motors deployed a totally restyled and re-engineered Toronado and Riviera. Both had softened considerably in the chassis, leaving the Thunderbird, for the first time, with a firmer ride than its General Motors competitors.

Motor Trend still found body roll better controlled in the General Motors products, and the Riviera out-sprinted the Thunderbird to 60 mph. But then the Ford gathered speed and passed the Riviera to turn the fastest quarter mile at 16.25 seconds and 86 mph.

The Thunderbird also delivered the quickest, straightest stops. Motor Trend even liked the Thunderbird's "Cave of Love cockpit ... with button-tufted brocade cloth upholstery ... ." The Toronado was "Spartan" by comparison.

"One gets the impression that T-bird is about to move off in a new direction," Motor Trend suggested coyly, "and hasn't yet made up its mind as to the intended path." Of course, the path had already been chosen, and according to Halderman, it was Bunkie who had chosen it. "Every time we made it bigger," Halderman recalled, "it seemed it sold a little better and broadened its appeal a little more."

When the new mid-size cars arrived for 1972, the new Thunderbird and Continental Mark IV shared a stretched version of their mechanical platform. But with a wheelbase of 120.4 inches and a shipping weight of 4,420 pounds, the "mid-size" Thunderbird was actually longer and a little heavier than its "full-size" predecessor.

Gone was the slow-selling four-door; there was just a single body style now, a bulky, straight-edged two-door hardtop wearing a few vague styling cues from its sleek 1970-1971 ancestors. Sales edged back up to 57,814 -- the T-Bird's best performance since 1968 -- then rocketed to 87,269 in 1973. The one-millionth Thunderbird, a copper hardtop with unique commemorative badges on its landau bars, rolled out of Wixom in 1972.

Ironically, no one was happier with Bunkie's last Thunderbird than Lee Iacocca himself. "The bigger [the Thunderbird] got, the better he liked it," recalled Halderman. "I really don't think Lee would ever admit this, but I think he learned a lot from Bunkie."

See the next page to find out how the 1967-1971 Ford Thunderbirds stack up in the collectible market.

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It was not until 1995 that the Vintage Thunderbird Club International (VTCI) accepted the 1967-1971 Ford Thunderbird as collectibles as worthy as the 1958-1966 models. In the meanwhile, owners of later Thunderbirds had formed their own clubs, including the Heartland Thunderbird Club and the International Thunderbird Club.

The wraparound "love seat" rear bench in this 1969 Thunderbird was a trademark of Thunderbird style.

"The 1967s had much-improved engineering, much better styling, and trick goodies like hideaway headlamps that were all the rage at the time," said John Ryan, VTCI's technical adviser for the 1967-1971 generation. "But dropping the convertible seemed to tick off the diehard Thunderbird fans. They were still mourning the loss of the [1955-1957] two-seater."

VTCI President Alan H. Tast sees it differently. "The Thunderbirds in that period, 1967-1971, were trying to be a luxury car and a better-proportioned family car, trying to compete against the Rivieras and the Eldorados, and just couldn't generate the enthusiasm that the GM products could." Yet, this very "conservatism of the Thunderbird design" drove its commercial success. "They knew that going way out on the deep end with concept styling was not the way to go. They learned that in 1961."

Yet as the 1967-1971 cars have aged, Thunderbird enthusiasts have softened on them. "In recent years," added Ryan, "interest surrounding these cars has increased a lot. But guess what? There aren't any left. The 1958-1960s were being gathered in as early as 1968 by the founders of VTCI. These were eight- to 10-year-old used cars then, and many could be had in nice shape, whereas the 1967-1971s were great road cars and led hard lives as a result. Owners literally drove them into the graveyard."

Ryan reported that 899 of the 1967 two-door hardtops are known to survive and estimated similar numbers for the 1968-1971 models. Four-doors, he observed, "seem harder to find." His own 1967 hardtop was recently appraised at $8,500, and other Thunderbirds from this era have appeared in Hemmings Motor News with asking prices as high as $10,000.

To find models, prices, and production numbers for the 1967-1971 Ford Thunderbird, continue to the next page.

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When Ford designers began planning for the 1967 Thunderbird, rival General Motors had a couple of competing personal-luxury coupes on the market, with more on the way, all of them big. It was decided the Thunderbird should keep pace. With face-lifts, the resulting car ran through 1971. Here are the specifications for the 1967-1971 Ford Thunderbird:

The 1971 Ford Thunderbird hardtop coupe sold 9,146 units.

1967 Ford Thunderbird Models, Prices, Production

Thunderbird (wheelbase 114.7; 4-door 117.2)	Weight	Price	Production
hardtop coupe	4,248	$4,603	15,567
Landau hardtop coupe	4,256	4,704	37,422
Landau 4-door sedan	4,458	4,924	21,925
Total 1967 Ford Thunderbird			77,956

1968 Ford Thunderbird Models, Prices, Production

Thunderbird (wheelbase 114.7; 4-door 117.2)	Weight	Price	Production
hardtop coupe	4,366	$4,716	9,977
Landau hardtop coupe	4,372	4,845	33,029
Landau 4-door sedan	4,458	4,924	21,925
Total 1968 Ford Thunderbird			64,931

1969 Ford Thunderbird Models, Prices, Production

Thunderbird (wheelbase 114.7; 4-door 117.2)	Weight	Price	Production
hardtop coupe	4,348	$4,824	5,913
Landau hardtop coupe	4,360	4,964	27,664
Landau 4-door sedan	4,460	5,043	15,695
Total 1969 Ford Thunderbird			49,272

1970 Ford Thunderbird Models, Prices, Production

Thunderbird (wheelbase 114.7; 4-door 117.2)	Weight	Price	Production
hardtop coupe	4,354	$4,961	5,116
Landau hardtop coupe	4,630	5,104	36,847
Landau 4-door sedan	4,464	5,182	8,401
Total 1970 Ford Thunderbird			50,364

1971 Ford Thunderbird Models, Prices, Production

Thunderbird (wheelbase 114.7; 4-door 117.2)	Weight	Price	Production
hardtop coupe	4,399	$5,295	9,146
Landau hardtop coupe	4,370	5,438	20,356
Landau 4-door sedan	4,509	5,516	6,553
Total 1971 Ford Thunderbird			36,055

Source: Encyclopedia of American Cars, by the Auto Editors of Consumer Guide, Publications International, Ltd., 1996.

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