Auto News 5

Ford of America's president, Mark Fields, needs to visit his mom more often. What with the daily pressures of saving Ford and all, he could use a bit more of his very down-to-earth mother's brand of support. Elinor Fields lives not far from the old family home in Paramus, New Jersey. She is the mother behind a son who has navigated his way through an economics degree at Rutgers, an MBA at Harvard, and what has been a stunning career at Ford. Fields headed Mazda in Japan at age 38, the youngest person to ever run a Japanese car company. He went on to lead the Premier Automotive Group, now dismantled, and he sits at the right hand of Alan Mulally, trying to move his Way Forward program, well, forward.

You come into this world alone. You leave it alone. And although the tried and trusted truism overlooks it, you will spend a lot of time along the way all by your lonesome, too.

In the 1950s, most Detroit cars got an annual face-lift, with big sellers getting all-new body shells every two or three years. Low-volume cars like the Chevrolet Corvette didn't justify big investment, but since fiberglass was cheap to tool, General Motors intended to change Corvettes every year to demonstrate the potential for plastic body panels on mainstream cars. The original Corvette design lasted three years, but the 1956 face-lift was supposed to be good for only one. In 1955, it fell to me to stick four headlights on the C1 front end for 1957, while simultaneously working on the C2, due in '58 with its new shorter-wheelbase, V-8-only chassis.

When an astute Frenchman named Pierre Boulanger wrote the design brief for what would become one of the world's most iconic cars, the requirements were simple: It had to carry two people and a 110-pound sack of potatoes at a speed of 30 mph, all while achieving 90 mpg. It also had to be able to comfortably traverse dirt roads and rutted farmland.

In the 2000 Mel Gibson comedy, What Women Want, a man suddenly gains the power to hear what women are thinking. Not having seen the movie (I was single in 2000 and thus excused from seeing chick flicks), I can't tell you what women wanted eight years ago. But, thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I can tell you what they want today, from cologne to clothes to cars. Spoiler alert: owners of the 1987 Dodge Ram D150 might want to stop reading right now.