lsohgirl wrote:
Like another friend who bought a Mustang with a 428 cobra jet, that required you pull the block out of the engine compartment in order to change spark plugs.
.
The story that I got on that was from a neighbor who had once worked on the Ford assembly line,  After about 1964-65 the company had become so departmentalized that the designers in one department didn't know what designers in another department were doing.  It was a clash of egos.

He told me that when they were building the new Mustangs, someone noticed a spark plug tip had broken.  The decision was made to just change it when the car got to the end of the line for finishing.  But when it got there they figured out that the spark plug COULDN'T be changed because one of the shock towers was in the way.   After standing around and doing some head scratching they realized they had to actually unbolt the entire engine and raise the block about six inches to change one damn spark plug!   Oh, well...  Too bad consumers.  They sent the badly designed cars out anyway.

Ford and Chevy were not the only ones guilty of such moronics at the time.  Pontiac sent out a boatload of cars (mostly the bigger block ones like GTO's) that the timing chains would pull themselves apart in less than 20,000 miles, requiring the entire front of the block to be rebuilt to simply change the chain.

But you are right about those Vega's.  Very cool looking little cars (and fast) but the engines would just grenade before long.

And people wonder why I went to late 60's and early 70's Chrysler products?  The slant six and 318 still survive as the best engineered engines ever built, Dodges Charger Datona (and Plymouth's Super Birds) became the first production street cars to break the 200mph record on the track,  Of course the 80's and 90's were not good to the company business infrastructure and Mother Mopar was broken up into bite-sized pieces, never to recover.

"It's better to have accomplishments remarkable enough to be put in question, than to have no accomplishments at all."