1968 Ford 15M RS / Mario Caldeira via Portal Classicos
Ford’s compact Cardinal never made it to America, but Ford of Germany managed to sell 680,206 units of the German Taunus 12M P4 version through 1966, plus a further 668,187 of its successor, the 1966–1970 12M/15M P6. Here’s a quick look at the sportiest version of that later model, the racy-looking but underpowered 1968–1970 Ford 15M RS.
As unhappy as Ford-Werke (Ford of Germany) had been about being saddled with the curious front-wheel-drive Cardinal — a Dearborn-developed subcompact originally intended as a German-American coproduction — the whole business didn’t turn out badly for Ford’s Cologne-based German subsidiary. Cologne finally had a replacement for its aged Taunus 12M, plus an all-new engine plant, and Ford Division in Dearborn had even reimbursed them for some of the costs of the smaller RWD project the Germans had been forced to cancel in favor of the Cardinal. The 1962–1966 Taunus 12M, known in Cologne as Projekt-4 (P4), had some flaws, but it sold well, eventually averaging more than 150,000 units a year over its four-year lifespan.
The German Ford Taunus 12M P4 was initially offered only as a two-door sedan, but a four-door arrived in September 1963; there were also wagon, van, and coupe versions / Ford Motor Company
The next-generation car, called P6, retained the FWD powertrain and a lot of the unit body structure of the Cardinal-based P4, but Ford-Werke had discarded most of Dearborn’s sillier ideas, like transaxle-mounted suspension arms and a cooling system that used the heater blower instead of a cooling fan. Other than its V-4 engines and front-wheel-drive, the P6 was now modern and conventional, with MacPherson struts up front, rack-and-pinion steering, front disc brakes and flow-through ventilation. It even had good aerodynamics, with a drag coefficient of around 0.38. What it lacked was excitement: The optional 1.5-liter engine gave decent go for this price class, but Ford didn’t have anything to rival the very popular Opel Kadett Rallye, which by the end of 1967 would be available with the new 1.9-liter CIH engine, making it a very hot number for an inexpensive German car.
The 12M and 15M versions of the P6 were basically trim levels, most easily distinguished by their headlights: round for the 12M, rectangular for the 15M / Ford Motor Company
Ford-Werke unveiled its own RS (Rally Sport) models at the IAA show in Frankfurt in September 1967, although they didn’t go on sale until March. The P6 version was called 15M RS, but it actually had the 1.7-liter V-4 from the bigger 17M (P7) line. The 15M RS featured virtually every sporty-car cue known to product-planner-kind: stripes, styled wheels, driving lamps, a three-spoke sport steering wheel, more supportive bucket seats, center console and floor shifter, and full instrumentation. (The silver car’s vinyl roof covering was optional, but seems to have been very common.)
By 1968, German Fords were no longer called Taunus, although the name would reappear in 1970 on the new Taunus TC / Mario Caldeira via Portal Classicos
Did the 15M RS drive as well it looked? Well, no, not really. Ford did give it a firmer suspension and radial tires (155 SR 14 on 4½-inch rims), but the rough and noisy 1,699 cc V-4 engine had only 70 PS, 20 PS shy of the Kadett Rallye 1.9. The fact that the 15M RS was 536 marks cheaper (around $134 at the contemporary exchange rate) was small consolation for the humiliation the Opel could administer in any straight-line contest: The big-engine Kadett was 2.8 seconds quicker to 62 mph (100 km/h) and 9 mph (15 km/h) faster all out. A 15M RS owner could also be spanked quite soundly by the cheaper Audi 80 L. In August 1968, Ford retuned the 1.7-liter engine for an extra 5 PS and gave the RS four-speed gearbox closer ratios, but it was only an incremental improvement.
There are four gauges in the center stack, with a tachometer, speedometer, and clock in the three round binnacles
As for handling, the 15M RS was still paying for the Cardinal’s sins. The early P4 had vague steering and soggy handling because Dearborn figured that was what American buyers would want, but it also had an unexpected propensity for nasty oversteer if you lifted off the throttle in a fast turn. For the P6, Ford overcompensated by dialing in a catastrophic amount of understeer, and the switch to rack-and-pinion made the steering very heavy. The unassisted disc/drum brakes were also heavy, and the new floor-shifted linkage for the excellent four-speed gearbox was heavy and vague. All this made sporty driving in a 15M RS a lot of work for relatively little reward. (Power brakes were newly optional for 1968, power steering was not.)
This 15M RS is a two-door sedan, but there were also coupe and four-door versions / Ford Motor Company
But — and here was the eternal triumph of Ford product planners in this era — the 15M RS looked pretty good, and its extras were mostly worth having even if the car didn’t actually outperform the cheaper models in any tangible way, which was apparently enough for many. German Ford production figures aren’t broken out by grade, but the RS seems to have been reasonably successful during the remaining two years of the P6 run.
Nonetheless, the 15M RS is now fairly obscure, with none of the multi-generational adoration that the hotter English Fords have received — the price of being all show and no go.
Related Reading
Automotive History: The Real Story of How the American Ford FWD Cardinal Became the German Ford Taunus 12M – From Dearborn With Love (by Paul N)
Curbside Classic: 1968 Opel Kadett Rallye 1900 – The European SS396 Which Up-Ended The Old World Order (by Paul N)
Ford Cardinal, Taunus, and Prelate: The First FWD Fords (at Ate Up With Motor)
This post gets me to thinking… I know the US got Ford cars from the UK from about 1958-1970, but what German Fords were sold in the US? I can only think of the Capri and Fiesta. Were there others?
There were some German Fords sold back in the 1950s, the 17M, along with the UK Fords.
2016-2017 Ford Focus RS was imported here from Saarlouis, Germany.
The Merkur Scorpio was built in Cologne
The Merkur XR4Ti is a sorta one, body panels came from the Genk, Belgium plant and the cars for the U.S. were assembled by Karmann in Rheine, Germany.
Yes, these weren’t exactly brilliant cars all-round, by a healthy margin. The styling came off as Falconesque, and the performance chops seemed more superficial than real. Not exactly a high point for Ford Cologne.
Ford UK sent their effort to Colin Chapman to get a performance version, those Fords did get up and go and Lotus Cortinas racing on a Sunday sold an awful lot of 1200cc Shitboxes on Monday
Curious. The styling, while more modern, still looked a bit off, and the engineering, while technically superior, still didn’t seem up to par.
Thanks for this look at a car I knew nothing about.
Deary me, what an steamingly excretious little hillock. What with its poor handling, heavy steering, and brakes, and not enough go, it was virtually virtueless.
How very silly, when the technically boring Mk2 Cortina of ’66 was vastly better, and, bereft of the odd proportions of the German, a great looker to this day. And it was being made by the same company just 500 miles away.
Like Peter, I knew nothing much about these. It’s the sort of car I’d see in the background of some rubbishy Euro-pudding ‘6o’s or ’70’s film years ago, you know, one with spies and silenced guns – and, most importantly, car chases – which would leave me to ponder just what that familiarly strange machine was.(In fact, probably more than I paid attention to the plot, which was also because there wasn’t one, but I digress). Now, I know: the baddie in The Spy Who Loved Krankwurst (or thereabouts) understeered out of the picture and into a canal in a 15M, and no wonder.
Unlike the early Cardinal/P4, whose handling was genuinely dire, the P6 didn’t handle badly — it was just very stodgy, and completely out of its league as a sporty car. The 1.5- and 1.7-liter 15M sedans were actually among the quicker German cars in their price class at the time, but for this kind of performance stuff, the Kadett Rallye 1.9 really set the cat amongst the pigeons, in a way Ford-Werke were obviously not prepared to answer directly. But it’s true that the 15M RS would have been no match at all for a Mk2 Cortina 1600GT or 1600E, much less the specialist English Fast Fords, which didn’t have any German equivalent at this point.
The wood veneer on the dashboard looks a bit out of place for a “sporty” oriented car. And the hip bend combined with the straight black trim line doesn’t really contribute to a consistent appearance either. The whole package looks a little bit “home spun”. At least they didn’t paint the hood in matt black.
Speaking of paint: The 15m RS was only available in the two colors shown (red and silver).
The more “consumer-oriented” sporty English Fords (the GTs and -Es as opposed to the specialist sedan racer stuff) were keen on wood veneers as well, and a lot of the slightly later early Toyota Celica line ended up with the woodgrain “SW” trim pack, so the wood trim on the 15M RS was if anything a bit ahead of the curve. Whether it looked GOOD was of course another matter, although since the likely alternative in this period was to drown in a sea of all-black vinyl, it did have the virtue of providing a modicum of color.
Please don’t misunderstand. I like wood/veneer (whether real or from DuPont or from whoever) in a car’s interior. But in my opinion, h e r e it doesn’t fit really.
If you could build a car entirely out of sixties/seventies after market accessories this is what it would look like.