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Hal Sperlich, Unsung Father of the Mustang and the Minivan, Dead at 95

Ask the average automotive enthusiast who led the development of the Ford Mustang and Chrysler minivan, and the likely answer they’ll give you is Lee Iacocca. Which isn’t incorrect. Iacocca, as the eventual president of Ford and then the chairman of Chrysler, certainly did have a great deal to do with pushing those projects forward.
But when it came time to actually create those vehicles and put them into production, much of the job went to Harold K. “Hal” Sperlich, who died Sunday.
One of Detroit’s most important unsung automotive heroes, Sperlich grew up in the Detroit area and earned an engineering degree as well as an MBA from the University of Michigan. Sperlich, who served three years in the U.S. Navy, was hired by Ford in 1957 as a product planner. Three years later, Iacocca became general manager at Ford, and together they would work magic.
Sperlich, who helped bring Carroll Shelby and Ford together, was tasked with producing an affordable new car that would appeal to the burgeoning youth market. But how? He decided that to underpin the Mustang, he’d use the Ford Falcon, “which was probably the most boring car on the planet,” he told Motor Trend in 2013. “But it was a good car on a great platform, lightweight, efficient, and low cost. So I said, ‘Why don’t we make it off the Falcon?’ But everybody said it was ridiculous to try to do a sporty, attractive, fun car for the youth market off something as dull as that Falcon.”

It was not an easy sell, Sperlich told the magazine. He presented the business plan to “about 20 executive vice-presidents, and Henry,” as in Henry Ford II. “Nobody would raise their hand until they saw what Henry wanted to do, and he finally said OK. When Henry came out of the meeting, he grabbed Iacocca and me and said, ‘You got your [explicative] car. It better work!’” In its first year, Ford sold 400,000 Mustangs. The target was 100,000.

Sperlich worked on a variety of other Ford programs, including the front-drive Fiesta, but a passion of his was a smaller front-wheel-drive van that would fit in a garage. A rear-wheel-drive van would require too high of a floor and a roof to properly do what Sperlich wanted, and Henry Ford refused to green-light the project.
The increasingly frustrated Sperlich knew that his and Iacocca’s time at Ford was limited. “I was aggressive and pushing; Lee was aggressive and pushing,” Sperlich told Motor Trend. Both were fired. Sperlich went to Chrysler in 1977, followed a year later by Iacocca.
All the while at Chrysler, Sperlich pushed for his minivan, but the company was too broke to undertake such a project. The federal government loaned Chrysler some money, which they repaid ahead of schedule. Though it’s hard to believe now, the original K-car that money financed was a success, and funded what became the Chrysler minivan.
“If Henry Ford II had accepted my minivan concept, Chrysler would not exist. The minivan is the backbone of Chrysler today,” Sperlich told Al Rothenberg, a writer for Ward’s Auto, for a story that was published in 1996.

Sperlich became president of Chrysler, but he resigned in 1984 after Iacocca and his staff began spending more money on diversification into other industries than the core product. “It was a tough time,” Sperlich said. He went on to serve as chairman of Delco Remy, the Indiana-based parts supplier. In 2009, he was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame. The program called Sperlich “a product planning genius as the chief architect of the original Ford Mustang and Chrysler minivan.”
In the groundbreaking 1986 David Halberstam auto-business book, The Reckoning, the Pulitzer Prize winner wrote that Sperlich was far, far ahead of the industry when it came to weaning America off full-sized autos: “When the market for big cars finally went sour in the late seventies, during the energy crisis, the Detroit people argued that it was not their fault, for they had produced small cars in the past and their customers had turned away. That was true, Sperlich believed, but it was far from the whole truth, which was that the industry had never given its customers good small cars. Rather, he was convinced, Detroit had produced its small cars in precisely the wrong way, not as a labor of love but as a defensive necessity, to fend off at least momentarily the European invasion. It had been done by men whose hearts had never been in it.”
Asked if he had any advice for product planners in 2013, the year the Motor Trend interview was published, what Sperlich said then rings just as true today: “Nobody is innovating, creating new segments. Look at my history: Mustang, never done before. Fuel-efficient front-drive cars for America, never done. Minivans, never done. It was going outside of the rearview-mirror segments. A lot of new niches are possible. You could do a Mustang-type car again and have a car young people would love to have.”
In 2014, asked by Car and Driver to name the “coolest thing” that had happened to him at Ford, Jim Farley, now its CEO, said this: “Hundreds of things. Like when I met Hal Sperlich, I couldn’t stop asking him questions. ‘What was it like to design the Mustang? And why didn’t Ford go for the first minivan?’”
Hal Sperlich was 95.
Years ago Car & Driver ran an article headlined, “The Grosse Pointe Myopians”. I don’t remember the article so much as the headline. I am from Detroit and remember the Roger Smith era at GM. There was so much potential and so much money squandered in the name of corporate hubris.
HIstory, if we pay attention, teaches us that CEOs are not necessarily the best and the brightest. Occasionally the true visionaries like Hal Sperlich persevere and true genius triumphs.
I think the Grosse Pointe article might have been written by Brock Yates. I think it was an excerpt from his book “The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry,” published in 1983.
My dad worked at GM in the 60’s/70’s/80’s in Pontiac skilled trades. He always complained that at GM someone would have a great idea, like hiring Deming, or the Fiero, or Saturn, and it would get kicked off with a big bang, then the old slow GM death mediocrity would creep in and ruin it. I worked at Chrysler starting in ’97 and took the buy-out in 2008. I then came back for a stint to help with the Viper from 2010 to 2016. I wish I could have started there 5 or 6 years earlier, but it sure was a great place to work. I learned a ton, we built some great cars, and had a good time doing it.
From the stories I’ve read, the story actually went in reverse: The team convinced the Deuce that Ford needed this car, finally after many attempts, and the Deuce gave them a very small development budget and Sperlich was forced into using the Falcon platform instead of engineering a new ground up platform which is what they originally wanted to do. Given this scenario, which sounds more likely, the final product is even more impressive than expected. Sprelich was great at turning “sow’s ears into silk purses”.