While it wasn’t as fanciful as the show cars of the 1950s, Ford’s 1968 Techna concept car was an elaborate, earnest attempt to envision the automobile of the ’80s, 1960s style: still big, thirsty, and low-slung, but roomier, more convenient to get into or out of, and (gasp) easier to work on. Few of its predictions came true, but the Techna remains a fascinating, sometimes bizarre time capsule from an automotive alternate universe. Let’s take a look.
Ford was right about one thing with the Techna: The cars of 15 years in its future were indeed preoccupied with, as a 1969 Ford technical paper put it, “SPACE, more space.” The first wave of downsizing that began in 1977–1978 brought big improvements in “packaging efficiency,” offering more space in smaller cars.
The Techna, first shown in the summer of 1968, wasn’t a smaller car by any means. It was about the size of a 1963 Ford Galaxie in every dimension except track width (which was much wider) and height (it was even lower than a 1968–1969 Thunderbird). With a curb weight of 4,745 lb, the Techna was actually 43 lb heavier than a 1969 Mercury Marquis four-door hardtop. However, Ford claimed the Techna was more spacious inside, seating “six full-sized occupants in complete comfort,” with a flat floor for passengers’ feet.
Ford could have achieved that with front-wheel drive — imagine a car the size of an Oldsmobile Toronado that was shaped for passengers and luggage rather than a swoopy fastback personal luxury coupe — but they decided early in the development of the Techa project that alternative drive concepts like FWD or a rear engine were off the table, “either because of their adverse economics or because of their effect on other considerations, such as … interchangeability of the main power train components with more conventional vehicles.”
Instead, Ford did something rather peculiar: shifting the engine 9 inches forward while canting the engine and driveshaft both downward and sideways and offsetting the differential about 10 inches to the left. This kept the driveshaft hump out of the way of the occupants’ feet and let the seats be lowered to maintain headroom with the low-slung roof. A big downside: The Techna driveshaft required three costly CV joints. Ford considered offsetting the transmission and differential even more, which would have needed only two CV joints, but would have required expensive axle tooling changes.
As the above diagram shows, the front part of the driveshaft now passed BETWEEN the driver and front middle passenger, while the rear ran between the left and center passengers. It worked, I guess, but it was more than a little odd.
You may be saying, “Wait, wouldn’t moving the engine that far forward make the car disastrously nose-heavy?” “No problem,” said Ford. They rearranged the underhood components to put the alternator and A/C hardware behind the engine (the compressor was driven off a jackshaft), and shifted the heavy battery to the trunk. This way, Ford claimed, “the weight distribution is nearly ideal — 55% front at curb.”
If you share the reflexive buff book disapproval of anything other than near-equal weight distribution, hearing 55/45 distribution described as “nearly ideal” may be disconcerting. Detroit engineers of the ’60s insisted that almost any chassis design be suitable for carrying a full load of passengers and luggage, and the fact that most people didn’t drive that way very often just didn’t seem to compute. (The early Corvair suffered badly from this assumption: Its suspension geometry was optimized for a 600 lb load, which made it potentially very treacherous for solo drivers.)
Another interesting trick for better headroom was what Ford called a sandwich floor. This was two sheets of thin steel bonded to a honeycomb of 1-inch tall steel hexagons. (This did look very cool, although it can’t have been cheap to make.) Although the Techna still had a separate perimeter frame, the sandwich floor could carry more of the structural load, so the each sill was about 4 inches narrower, although it was also taller to step over. Ford claimed this was easier than a lower, wider sill, but I have my doubts — and I suspect the taller stepover might be especially obnoxious for women wearing high heels.
The Techna feature I find most contentious is its “Unisite” split bench front seat. The front seat was fixed in place, with adjustable driver controls: a tilt/telescope steering column and power adjustable foot pedals.
Fixed seats with adjustable controls are an idea that pops up every so often — the 1962 Ford Mustang I concept car had them, and some recent production trucks and SUVs have offered power-adjustable pedals. Engineers and safety experts love fixed seats because they can be better-reinforced for crash safety and keep occupants at consistent positions relative to the dashboard and windshield (and, on modern cars, the airbags, which can be deadly if someone is too close when they deploy).
However, adjustable controls are only one aspect of getting a comfortable driving position, and fixed seats only work well for whatever standard-size dummy the engineers used during the design process. Also, I think fixed seats would make the interior layout too inflexible. For instance, imagine you were moving houses and wanted to put a big box in the back seat — with the Techna, there was no chance of moving the passenger seat forward to make a little more room in back. The later popularity of minivans demonstrates that many people want MORE flexibility in their interior arrangements, not less.
Every old concept car had to have at least one feature that seemed futuristic at the time, but now seems hilariously quaint. The Techna didn’t have conventional gauges for oil pressure and the like, but instead of conventional warning lights, it used an electronic message center with a rotating drum that could show any of 16 different messages through a small window on the steering column. In addition to the usual warning light functions, this warning center would signal conditions like a burned-out exterior light bulb, low coolant, or low windshield washer fluid. A lot of ’70s and ’80s cars offered similar warning systems, but usually with a separate bank of warning lights, which was less mechanically complicated and didn’t limit you to only seeing one warning at a time.
Techna was a two-door hardtop with no A-pillars — the windshield was bonded solidly to the roof and cowl, needing no roof posts.
However, Ford still wanted it to be as easy to get into or out of as a four-door, and without the wide-swinging doors that could make big hardtops such a hazard to adjacent cars in parking lots. So, Ford fitted the Techna with power doors, using double hinge axes — the door hinges allowed the leading edge of each door to swing forward and outward simultaneously, sort of halfway between a conventional door and a sliding door in a van.
The latches were controlled by solenoids, and each door was opened and closed by a electric servomotor. The door controls were on an overhead console (Ford designers were very keen on overhead consoles in that era), and opening or closing a door took about 4 seconds. (There was a manual override latch in the door armrest.)
Ford sheepishly admitted that the power doors didn’t have auto-reverse mechanisms that would keep them from closing on a hand, pet, or small child, although they conceded this was a feature some “may consider as desirable.” When power sliding doors appeared on its minivans years later, this was a big area of buyer concern: Customers liked the convenience of power side doors, but were understandably concerned about not dismembering their kids.
The Techna wasn’t designed as a sporty car, so its engine and chassis were less interesting. It had a 428 engine with C6 automatic transmission, novel only in the weird mounting of the accessories and the low-profile intake manifold and carburetor. Ford didn’t offer any performance claims for the Techna, and since it was never intended as a production car, even putting it through its paces on a proving grounds test track probably wouldn’t have been very revealing.
Front suspension was conventional double wishbone, but the four-link rear suspension had transverse torsion bar springs rather than leaf springs or coils. Brakes were single-piston four-wheel discs, and the Techna had the new Kelsey-Hayes Sure-Track rear antilock braking system. With the exception of a tiny handful of racing homologation Mustangs, Ford production cars didn’t get rear discs until the ’70s, but Sure-Track became available on the Thunderbird and Mark III for 1969, and for a while was standard equipment on the Mark.
The Techna had a lot of other minor novelties that I’m skipping over here, but my favorite is that it was designed for easier repair and maintenance access. (Remember those? A lot of car designers don’t seem to.)
First, there was a “service hatch” in the hood for checking fluid levels and adjusting timing or carburetor settings, a feature that’s also shown up on some vans over the years. I’m not too enthusiastic about this for passenger cars, and it would probably have just been an invitation for gas station attendants to spill oil or windshield wiper fluid on the hood.
The cooler part was that the entire front end of the Techna could swing up from the base of the windshield forward, exposing not only the engine, but also the entire front suspension. Anyone who’s ever skinned their knuckles trying to maneuver a socket wrench in a crowded engine compartment can only stare at this longingly and think nostalgically of the days when automakers at least OCCASIONALLY thought about service accessibility.
Ford said the tilting section was 25 lb lighter than a conventional hood and fenders because the steel stampings were bonded together with epoxy rather than welded. This was allegedly achieved without sacrificing safety, and the Techna used an energy-absorbing S-frame for collision safety, something Ford had just introduced for its big cars. The nose and tail also had “hi-flex” urethane covering, like the nose of the 1968 GTO, which would not dent in low-speed impacts.
I haven’t commented yet on the styling of the Techna. It looked a bit like the illicit offspring of Marcello Gandini’s 1967 Lamborghini Marzal concept car (which had swing-up gull-wing doors) and a 1968 Chevrolet Caprice, but there was something not quite right about its proportions. It wasn’t ugly, just … off.
The Techna was still what most designers of the mid-’60s assumed the future would look like: semi-fastback styling with a pointed nose and a certain spacecraft air. However, just two months before the Techna made its public bow, the Lincoln Continental Mark III had set the stage for a styling future that looked a lot more like the past, kicking off more than a decade of neoclassical design with stand-up grilles and padded vinyl tops rather than the pushbutton Star Trek futurism represented by the Techna.
That made the Techna a kind of retro-future anachronism, like the Pan-Am space shuttle that appeared in 2001: A Space Odyssey later that year. It was futuristic, but the future from which it came was not ours. Ultimately, that statement sums up the entire Techna project, which was full of interesting novelties that fell short of real innovation.
The Techna might have had more foot room than a full-size Ford or Mercury, but its rated interior dimensions were no better, and it had a small trunk for such a big car. It might have been roomier if it were a different shape, but when the Techna was designed in 1965–1966, “low and sleek” were still considered prerequisites for any “futuristic” design. Worse, all the unusual features (like that complex sandwich floor) would have made the Techna a lot more expensive to build than a contemporary car, with only modest practical benefits to show for it.
The hardest part of predicting technological futures is not imagining new technology, or coming up with new applications for technologies that already exist — it’s envisioning the evolutionary pressures that ultimately drive change. Ford’s first round of downsized cars wouldn’t be lower and wider, they’d be taller and boxier, with thinner doors and thinner seats to squeeze out a few extra fractions of an inch of usable space.
Ford didn’t do all that because LTD buyers had suddenly decided they’d really like a few more inches of toe room in their 7-liter land yachts. The focus on better packaging was a desperate attempt to convince customers that they weren’t giving up too much passenger and luggage space along with all that “road-hugging weight,” which Ford needed to shed to improve fuel economy and emissions without big investments in new propulsion technologies. Ford certainly wasn’t about to saddle the Fairmont, Zephyr, and their later platform-mates with a pricey triple-CV-joint driveshaft, even if it would have made them more spacious inside.
I think this disparity between the real and the imagined is what makes old concept cars like the Techna or the atomic-powered fancies of the ’50s so entertaining: They imagined a straighter line from the present to the future, with fewer of the messy pitfalls that have often shaped our time.
Related Reading
1968 Ford Galaxie 500 Sportsroof- Always Ready to Roll (by Jason Shafer)
Vintage Review: 1978 Ford Fairmont/Mercury Zephyr – Functional But Flavorless (by GN)
I’m wondering if moving the final drivetrain to the rear in the form of a transaxle would have been unreasonably more expensive than that canted drivetrain pipedream with the jack-shafted alternator and other gadgets they dreamed up. First generation Tempest buyers didn’t seem to object to owning this type of set up. So, why would future Ford buyers?
Mounting the driveshaft as low as possible, through connecting it to the flywheel via chain drive, similar to the Toronado’s would have reached the humpless floor objective they were looking for, without friction loss through a “rope drive” set-up
I think they rejected that as requiring too much new tooling. The canted driveshaft required more expensive components, but didn’t require any radical tooling changes. (I don’t know that that was a good compromise, but I think that was the rationale.)
The roofline and the C-pillar remind me a bit of the 1971 GM full-size B-body coupes.
Well, the front door mechanism turned up unpowered 33 years later on the Renault Avantime, though it is true that that glorious vision of the future couldn’t even sell in its present.
I like the oddball drivetrain angling – not that I see enough benefit from it – simply because it has the mark of trying to think outside the square. We are very reflexive in seeing such thinking about the familiar as “odd”.
Some of the stuff, though, is plain silly. The pillarless windscreen is cool, and also more than a tad impractical, not to mention unsafe. And as photographed, it looks about as thick as Mr Magoo’s glasses to be even slightly viable.
I must say I damned if I see any of the amazingly beautiful Marzal in this creation, but I do agree that the decent styling isn’t quite “right” either.
The thing that jumps out at me immediately is just how ugly it is. I get it, you want to showcase all of this stuff but you’d think job 1 would be to make it visually appealing.
Well, in their defense, Ford never claimed “Visually Appealing is Job 1”.
Then again, They DID (at one time) claim (well, ‘say’) that “Quality is Job 1”.. and, well that turned out to be just a saying, not actual Criteria for their manufacturing techniques.
😉
All things considered, the Techna seems to me to be rather attractive in side profile. I’m less enthusiastic about the front end, which curiously seems ok in itself, but just poorly integrated into the rest of the car. Those seats seem incredibly un-supportive and if they’re not adjustable, would just be horrible to live with in the real world. I’d imagine sliding around while trying to reach the controls and then feeling totally boxed in once I got everything adjusted. Yech.
Seeing the DC promotional shots, there on the Mall in front of the Department of Commerce, was fascinating. It seems those were taken in the Fall of 1968…which would have been after DC’s spring and summer of discontent. Just a few blocks away from where those pictures were taken, a lot of the city was still in ruins and wouldn’t recover for years. (I was living there at the time, in 3rd grade. It was memorable.)
On a lighter note, it’s also funny to think about wanting easy access to the engine for “timing adjustments”. Was this really something that would be attended to at service station stops? Like adding washer fluid or checking the oil?
Interesting article.
If I ever saw this I had forgotten about it completely. I am kind of amazed that torsion bars didn’t see more use in rear suspension systems, be they transverse or longitudinal. Other than cost, of course, which actually drives everything.
I love these dead-end ideas of what some saw the future look like. American auto designers seemed to be fixated on 3-abreast seating in the front for decades. But from my experience, this was something that almost nobody actually wanted. Sure, people sat that way in a pinch, but seating 2-2-2 minivan style is a LOT better way to travel than sitting 3-3 in a sedan.
As for the styling, I see a lengthened and flattened Avanti (except for the C pillar) in that front 3/4 view. I agree that the styling is not quite there, but I like the overall shape of it.
Oh, and one other example of the adjustable pedals was when GM offered it in (I believe) 1975. My mother got a loaner Catalina from our Pontiac dealer when the 74 LeMans was in for service, and it was the first car I had seen with them after reading about them in one of the magazines. I don’t think they were around long.
“I am kind of amazed that torsion bars didn’t see more use in rear suspension systems, be they transverse or longitudinal.”
Well, apart from tens of millions of Renaults, Peugeots and later Citroens, and every air cooled VW ever sold, no, but then, what have the Romans ever done for us?
It’s true that in RWD, the only cars that readily springs to mind are the ’50’s Baroque Angel sedans, though doubtless there’s some others.
Double hinged long doors were quite successful on the Lexus SC300/SC400/Toyota Soarer coupes.
Yes, although they weren’t power-opening.
Here’s the door of a 1991 GZ20 Soarer — not the best angle, but you can sort of see how the door hinges are articulated.
This car has a lot of complicated solutions to problems that could be solved more simply by other means. Most obviously the off-center, triple-jointed driveshaft; Wouldn’t it be better just to have front drive and a completely flat floor? Nixing FWD “because of (its) adverse economics or because of their effect on other considerations, such as … interchangeability of the main power train components with more conventional vehicles” rings hollow when GM already had two FWD cars in production with standard engines with the (admittedly novel) unitized power pack the only major new engineering, so the premise doesn’t really hold water IMO. More of the same with the double-hinged power doors – how about van-style sliders, or just four regular doors? Likewise the overly complex dash alert layout. The adjustable pedals and steering wheel would eventually reach production, but on a non-airbag car it’s easier just to have the usual back and forth seats. Speaking of which, rear legroom looks tight in the photo shown.
I do find the Techna attractive, looking rather like a 1968 GM four-door hardtop with the windows down until I realize there’s just one really long door on each side. The front of the car looks like it should be the back, and again looks more GM than Ford. The no A pillar thing was done to greater effect on the 1956 Chrysler Norseman (at least for the handful of people who saw it in real life). The lights atop the front fenders are pure DKW F102. But I can’t blame Ford for an inaccurate prediction of the future – nobody else thought we’d all be driving tall grey SUVs a half century later either. As for 2001: A Space Odyssey, it may have got the space shuttle wrong, but it nailed the iPad.
The resistance to FWD for this car is particularly ironic given that the GM Unitized Power Package in the Toronado and Eldorado was dependent on at least one Ford Motor Company patent related to the abortive FWD Thunderbird project earlier in the decade.
Also, the back seat wasn’t as cramped as that photo made it look. In rear seat dimensions, it was about the same as a 1967 four-door Galaxie/LTD (36.2 inches of legroom, 37.2 inches of headroom, 62.6 inches of hip room), with about 2.5 inches more shoulder room. There just weren’t any available photos giving a better view of it.
I’m really not seeing much of a 68 Caprice, as mentioned. (Barely.. ‘maybe’ that one angle just above the ‘grille area’).
More of a Mashup between a Mustang and a 68/9 ish Dodge Charger. (Somehow, I also see a Riviera and/or Corvair in the roof/ window openings).
I’m REALLY thinking that just about EVERY car/ truck should have that ‘forward flip’ front end. Oh man how much easier life would be (would have been).
Right??!
You’d love the Triumph Herald (and its Vitesse, Spitfire, GT6 variants)
This strikes me as an obvious response by Ford to the ’66 Toronado, with its flat floor and improved 3+3 seating. As JPC pointed out earlier, that was a completely irrelevant issue in higher end cars like this; folks that could afford Toronados and such did not go through life riding three abreast. This was all-too soon obvious.
As such, this car is frankly something of a joke, as it did nothing to actually move forward the state of the art and address the issues that were becoming more self-evident. Import sales were soaring at the time, and younger buyers were not interested in 3+3 luxury coupes. Fail.
Can you imagine how badly that steel honeycomb floor would succumb to rust in snowy regions? It’s relieving it still relies on a perimeter frame to hold it together because otherwise I’m imagining when that floor goes that pillarless windshield becomes the structure holding the car in one piece… for about 3 seconds. Even with the perimeter frame though with the honeycomb floor adding such structural load to it degradation will presumably make this thing a wet noodle with the windshield breaking constantly(that is of course if the occupants hadn’t fallen through the floor first).
The ease of maintenance ideas is novel and well intended, but at the same time I can’t help but think was that really a problem on full sizers to begin with??? The cars in Fords stable at the time that were difficult were the big V8s stuffed between the cumbersome Falcon platform spring towers, Galaxies (and pretty much all cars that used a conventional front frame section) have ample access by comparison, and though the tilt open hood seems incredible for access, when you look close at the engine knowing all its accessories are behind it that area looks mighty cluttered doesn’t it? Think an alternator replacement would take less time on this than a car with a front mounted one? Doubtful.
As for the styling it really does look oddly early 70s GMish. The car it most closely resembles to me is the HQ Holden Monaro, only much bigger. The rooflines are almost identical, even the rear end styling has a resemblance
Blimey, don’t ever tell the Monaro coupe nutters that or they might roll a very large beer can over you! But yes, the roof, especially in profile, really does have resemblance, and the HQ was famous too for having very thin A-pillars. (The rear of the Ford? In the real world, not so much).
I’m oceans apart so bring it! Haha. I agree the rear end isn’t a direct match like the roofline but the fairly nondescript horizontal lenses is at the very least similar, GM mostly just added it’s in vogue taillights in bumper treatment to integrate them into.
But to just ruffle some feathers and create an international incident on a completely unrelated level the HQ Monaro front end also looks like a 65 Mustang.
I actually like the styling, though it screams GM to me, not Ford in 1968. Though that’s not a bad thing. But as a functional concept car, it seems too restricted by the project budget.
“…easier repair and maintenance access.” – how quaint! It seems most modern cars are designed around unit replacement, the unit being the entire car.
There’s a connection between Ford’s imagined ’80s and my lived one, by way of my garage-sale loving aunt who’d pass along old, used (and just about used up) early Hot Wheels cars. They never did a Techna but it has the vibe of an early HW with broken windshield pillars and the paint completely chipped off the mazak.
That is quite a machine for sure, one about which I knew nothing. Like other posters said, it is kind of weird that Ford didn’t go for FWD for this car. The canted engine and driveshaft can’t have been much cheaper than developing an FWD system. Added to that, Ford could learn about building FWD cars and not been so late to the party in the 1980s.
Ford DID develop a FWD system for the Thunderbird years before this, but abandoned it prior to production. The GM Unitized Power Package concept implicated at least one Ford patent from that project. And Ford had FWD cars in the ’60s and ’70s: the German Ford Taunus P4 (developed as the Cardinal) and P6, followed in the mid-’70s by the Fiesta.
I love seeing concept cars I never knew about like this. The styling reminds me of the mid sixties Barracuda SX concept by John Herlitz.
Not one of Ford’s better ideas. It looks like the proverbial answer to the question never asked.
Pretty neat looking from the front or side, I don’t think this would have ever sold well .
‘CV Joints’ ? not U-Joints ? .
I wonder how quickly those massive doors would have worn out their incredibly over complicated hinges .
-Nate
I’ve never seen this before, I guess it hit the gap between the mid 60s library books and the early 70s car magazines I read. There’s a lot of gee whizzery like the structural windshield instead of A pillars and some WTF. The offset driveshaft did allow better packaging of 6 people, but a Fiat Multpla did the same thing better with a normal FWD layout. The doors remind me of the Renault Avantime in spirit, and I suspect would have been equally unpopular.
I bet the people who designed this would never imagine a Ford Maverick hybrid as a mainstream vehicle
Thank you for this article – I found it really interesting. I was vaguely aware of this car, but didn’t know the details. On the one hand, I think it’s attractive; on the other, it seems like a compilation album of dead end ideas. Cool, though.
I found a short film of it in action.
And another thing – I wonder why the front lights were designed that way. Apart from them not being legal, they look a bit small.
Strongly suspect that Techna’s design, in some points (especially the front end, with those forward-facing fender flares), was inspired by the 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado. This is confirmed by a photo of a “Fordonado”, in which Ford almost completely copied Toronado’s design and slapped a Thunderbird badge on it. Ford closely followed GM’s design.
Oh, yes – this one.
https://www.facebook.com/fordmenlegends/posts/fords-toronado1964-ford-thunderbird-fwd-prototype-pictured-is-a-thunderbird-prop/1878347552219411/
It’s like the unholy offspring of a three-way between a T-Bird, a Riviera, and a Toronado.
A T-Bird and a Toronado, anyway.