Junkyard Find: 1961 Ford Falcon Fordor Sedan

When the Ford Motor Co. replaced the Model T with the Model A for the 1928 model year, the price tag for the cheapest possible new U.S.-market Ford car jumped 33 percent just like that. It wasn't until the introduction of the Falcon that the Model T had a genuine successor here, and I've found an early example in a Denver-area yard.

When the Falcon first appeared as a 1960 model, its MSRP was more than 15 percent less than the next-cheapest U.S.-market Ford car (the two-door Fairlane Business Sedan, a full-size car on the same wheelbase as the Galaxie at that time). More important, it was cheap to maintain and got excellent fuel economy.

Examples of the 1960-1963 Falcon (and its Mercurized sibling, the Comet) have become difficult to find in junkyards during the past couple of decades, after clogging up every Ewe Pullet for most of my junkyard-crawling life.

Even though today's car is rougher than most Junkyard Finds, I decided that it was worth documenting due to rarity and historical importance.

Another reason is that the build tag says it was born at San Jose Assembly in Milpitas, California. With the exception of the Tesla Factory (formerly NUMMI and Fremont Assembly) just up the Nimitz Freeway from Milpitas, there are no vehicle assembly plants in the San Francisco Bay Area today.

As someone who came of driving age in the Bay Area, I seek out vehicles built there. San Jose Assembly shut down in 1983, a year after Fremont Assembly closed. I'm always excited when I find junked vehicles from, say, Chrysler's San Leandro factory or GM's Oakland Assembly (as is the case with San Jose Assembly, shopping malls now reside on both sites).

Under the direction of Edsel Ford, a new compact model was designed in Dearborn during World War II. The idea was that the American civilian economy might take many years to recover from the war and a cheap, small car would be needed. Then Edsel died in 1943 and the economy boomed after the war, so this design ended up being shipped over to Ford France, which built it as the Vedette starting in 1948.

The Vedette's assembly plant in Poissy ended up being sold to Simca in 1954, along with all rights to the Vedette.

This led to the design being the basis of a Brazilian-market Falcon competitor sold by Chrysler and equipped with unlicensed Ardun OHV heads on V8-60 flathead blocks. If Ford had kept the Vedette design in the United States, perhaps it wouldn't have been necessary to start from scratch with the Falcon.

Ford did make an effort to sell left-hand-drive versions of its UK-market cars in the United States during the 1945-1959 period, including the Anglia, Prefect, Consul, Zephyr (shown here) and Zodiac. This didn't go well, so perhaps a re-Americanized Vedette would have also flopped.

Anyway, Ford under Robert McNamara designed the Falcon and it was an enormous showroom success. It was a conservative design, which contrasted well against the radical Chevy Corvair and the strangely styled Valiant.

Ford made money off the Falcon's chassis design for decades to come. There was the Mustang, of course, but also the Econoline, Maverick, Granada, and Versailles. The final cars to be based on the 1960 Falcon's chassis were built in Argentina in 1991.

The 1927 Model T Roadster's MSRP of $360 comes to about $6,891 in 2026 dollars, but car shoppers become much pickier 34 years later. The 1961 Falcon two-door sedan listed at $1,912 ($21,492 today), but just look at how roomy it was inside (for a woman about 4' 6" tall).

The only 1961 American car that could beat the Falcon on price was the base (flathead-powered) Rambler American, which cost a mere $1,831 for the business coupe.

Ford invented the "Tudor" and "Fordor" names back in the Model T era and revived them sporadically later on. It appears that 1962 was the final year for Falcon Tudors and Fordors.

What we seem to have here is a base-model Fordor. If this is the original engine, it's a 144-cubic-inch Falcon Six, rated at 85 horsepower and 134 pound-feet (those are optimistic gross figures).

For 37 extra bucks (that's about 416 bucks now), the buyer of a 1961 Falcon could get the 170-cube Falcon Special Six with 101 horses and 156 lb-ft.

The shifter is gone, but the build plate says this car had the base three-on-the-tree manual transmission. A Fordomatic two-speed automatic with column shifter was available for $163 ($1,832 after inflation).

Falcon shoppers couldn't get a factory-installed V8 in a production car until late in the 1963 model year, when a 260-cubic-inch Windsor with 164 horsepower became available.