A Car is Born - Ford River Rouge / Dearborn Assembly - 1960's 

My dad worked at the Rouge... In the glass plant for 42 years... He started at Highland Park in 1926... I especially like watching the glass being made and wishing I could see my dad working there

Love that smoking while working, and no respirator while painting…☺️

I worked at Rouge Steel for a couple months as a contractor. Inside was hell on earth. We parked near the cooling slabs and in the middle of January the car would be toasty warm at the end of a hard day.

When you see that tower with the elevators for the cars while they await their place back in the line, you can really see where carvana got the idea for their car vending machine.

It always fascinates me to watch cars being built from raw iron ore and seeing the finished car. I've loved automobiles ever since I was 2 years old. It was great seeing the beautiful Thunderbird, Lincoln, Mustang, and Cougar of 1968-1969 being finished and built. I sure wish they would have filmed this in color! I am sure everyone watching noticed that none of the workers wore any type of breathing protection or ear protection. If some of the younger ones are still alive today, they probably are deaf or got cancer from the carcinogens in the paint and breathing the lethal fumes of molten metal. I doubt any of them enjoyed a long retirement, sadly. I will never forget my school field trip visit in 1972 to the Arlington, Texas GM assembly plant. I was 11 years old. My best friend and I begged to lag behind the group so we could watch every process from arriving engines at one end, to hearing the cars fire up to life and being driven to the transport lot. I have never forgotten that trip. Beautiful Cutlasses, Monte Carlos, Skylarks, and Grand Prix.

Dad bought a 72 Country Squire in Dark Green Metallic with green interior. Had that car 16 years and a Great family hauler.

Something cool about working on the car and seeing it years later on the street knowing “I probably worked on that one” 😎

The whole process is AMAZING!

I once heard of a fella who knew a man that didn’t work at a car factory at all.

Like a City within a City. The Rouge is a beautiful complex.

No, INCREDIBLY CHEESY music or brain dead-looking, happy/smiling actors. This was a very refreshing, 'commercial' film. Especially for that era. ☮

In 1964 my family flew from California to Detroit to 1. Visit the place my mother was born and raised and 2. To pick up a brand new Pontiac GP. While there we took the tour of River Rouge were my grandfather had worked. He was a Ford employee since 1921 and we were honoring him by taking the tour. What an amazing tour it was starting with raw ore and turning it into an automobile was the highlight of the trip. Never forget how hot it was in the smelter. I thought working there would be horrible. I only foundout when I got home that that is where my grandfather worked.😳

My family and I did a tour through that plant at that time 67-68. It was absolutely amazing with the stamping Mills and all of the assembly line. But the guys taking those cars off to park them didn't play with them they were peeling out like nobody's business!! Thanks so much for posting this.

Wixom Assembly (since demolished) was where these 1968 Thunderbirds and Lincolns were built. Quality control was first rate at that time.

Truly amazing. Up the road in Flint, my uncle was a tool & die maker for Buick.

As a new car make ready man at a Ford dealer in 72 I can tell you those window inspection stickers took a lot of work to remove. Great video my Dad had a 69 T bird, mostly the same except for the amazing 429 Thunderjet V8, very well made car.

This is so amazing and the scale of the operation…

I went there back in 1973 on a third grade field trip.

I worked for Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company at a float and automotive plant in Lathrop and in Ohio. Fascinating stuff was going on in the automotive industry during the mid 90s..but a lot of shutdowns too. I was glad to see this manufacturing face on. 😀

As someone who started working for GM in 1970 in a GM engine plant,what amazed me is how many old men there are still working..I think it was the contract in 1973 where they achieved 30years and out for your full pension..The older guys left..Thank you for downloading this..

In 1968, our family lived in St. Paul, Minnesota and my dad bought my mom her first brand new car. It was a 1968 Ford Falcon Futura Sports Coupe. It was made in Canada!

11:54 Wow, no paint respirator. In the 80s, I painted my Dad's old 1955 Chevy truck with a bad mask and was coughing for 2 days.

Love those 68' T-Birds.

Spray painting [11:57 - 12:16] cars with solvent based paints and no masks or protection!!! UNREAL!

miss these type cars

I can't believe how bad some of the safety standards are for the late 60s. For one, amazing that those paint sprayers have no facial protection. I once had to work on the line there for a day repairing Hurst shifter threading. I was amazed at all the new parts on the floor. I wanted to take it all home. They just have a guy with a machine picking up the floors and throwing all that new stuff away.

awesome video, thanks!

Good video, but incorrect/missing locations: 20:31 shows a glimpse of a Thunderbird being built. Wixom Assembly was the sole assembly plant for T-birds until the 70's. 20:34 with the Ford being lowered down the tower is the St. Thomas assembly when it was very new.

I was just at the Ford museum so this is interesting to me. It felt sort of peculiar driving a Kia Soul rental car to Detroit. I had to leave the C-MAX at home ... I kept wondering if my car was gonna have tires the next day 😜

Thanks for posting this. I grew up in the motor city where my dad worked for Chrysler and all my friends had a job at the big three. By the time I was leaving high school, all the jobs had evaporated and plants were closing, 1979.

Now you know how HELL looks like.

I new car leaves the assembly line every 3 and 1/2 seconds 24 Hrs. a day 365 days a year. That was in 1968. How many a day are being built now? How long before there are more cars than people? Will we ever get enough?

i wonder how long those painters were able to maintain any semblance of respiratory health.

Back then manufacturing knew the hazards of 8 hours of exposure to sprayed solvents, loud percussive noises, metal particles from grinders, welders, etc. But it was a different era, and men were seen as expendable.

Great to the Mk3 in there

Those were the days when toxic exposure to employees was legal & these folks paid the price with their lives

No respirators at the paint line.

Someone should get the tooling for the bodies and make brand new bodies.

My grandfather was a tool and die. Man at Rouge plant in 1949 1950

Love it. Painting by hand with go gear on ????

"100,000 miles" Yeah, that's about right for cars of that age :)

Smoking a cigar on the job is priceless should have allowed to have a couple of beers a day as well. 😂🍺🚬

They didn't need safety standards, they were professional back then.

It's interesting seeing the company that developed the industry at a mid-point in automotive history. I guess paint respirators hadn't been invented in 1968. Geez.

There is a Swedish video similar to this, it's called "A Car is Björn"

I can’t imagine working an assembly line performing the exact same mundane task for 8+ hours day after day after day.

Lucky they look as good as Do cars😊

Is this proces anything like how cars are born today?

MY DAD WORK AT FORD PLANT. STARTED AT $5 A DAY. HE WAS A WELDER WITH OTHER WELDERS.

with all the "visual inspections" you can clearly understand why we were always taught to check the manufacture date - you didn't want a "Monday car" with all the hangovers and less than clear vision

Good video! Please reply. Dave...

My dad worked here back when my grandfather was 12. We used to help assemble the cars. We didn't do a very good job and often times the cars would fall apart but the workers would laugh and give us suckers. This was in 1902.

What was the life span of a painter in those days? Lucky to make 45 after there lungs hardened up. health safety didn't exist

23:57 That’s a 1969 Cougar so this must be 1968?

What does Dearborn look like today.

Alot of lemons came off of that line.

Could an engine block be milled instead of cast?

Cars today are SOOOOO much better than in the past. People get tired and make mistakes. Fact of life. I would not want a car made like a 60's car.

Amazing to say the least.

If this doesnt make you appreciate your car, I dont know what will!?

My dad worked there. Not sure what his job was. Safety was horrible then. As we can see by this video. He lost part of his index finger. Not sure on how he did it. I was to young at the time. And you didn’t call an attorney back then.

Ford must have passed on the water blast test on my old Ford van. I bought it new, in fact, ordered it. Every time it would rain, I'd have water pouring in everywhere. Ford didn't really seem to care.

The painters without the masks...OMG?

3:25 and they breath on that toxic fume😂 11:56 no masks here either😂

Seems so strange to not see the safety equipment that would be so commonplace today. The painters spraying away with no respirators or eye protection? Yikes!

Can't believe those painters are not wearing any masks . They must of died horrible deaths .

Does Ford even produce all these parts anymore?

now this is what I call in-house production...

LOL, 11:20 it didn't help they rusted away so fast

The voice of the narrator is so 60's as well. Did they select people with such a voice or did they learn people to talk with such a grumpy burbling voice? Nevertheless, it's very interesting to see how it went in those days. Around the year 2000 I was at a steel production plant, but even close to the furnaces it was clean and with fresh air.

i guess the much simpler and more efficient overhead camshaft eluded the usa for about 20 more years.

To hell with Disney, I’m going to see doors stamped lol

Amazing technology then, now cars are getting 200 plus miles. Fuel injection and better oils are a big part of why on the motors. My father was a mechanic, he taught me that carburetors would allow so much gas in the motor and oil, it would actually eat at the metal. Fuel injection is so precise there is hardly any that goes in the motor what's not used is recycled back to the tank. Cars are also a lot safer today. As beautiful as vintage cars are, they were death traps....

Painter without masks, probable all had cancer, so sad

When men were men!

Back when we were self sufficient and did not have to rely on China or Europe for a damn thing. Sad to see its all gone. Our country is a mere shell of what it used to be. Sad very sad

How in the world were these guys spray painting without masks?

Even in the 1960's robots were taking human jobs.

Can't believe not a single painter wearing a respirator and all the guys on the engine line installing the valve trains had ciggys dangling from their lips, it seems alien to me now that people could smoke cigarettes at work

I watched in horror as those guys sprayed acrylic lacquer without respirators or even basic masks. How many of them are even alive now?

Either Carvana ripped off Ford or Ford gave them the right to do what they do today

Painting with no masks, no goggles no hearing protection

Painters didn't have masks.

i wonder how many of people in those jobs have been replaced by computers and robots? I bet if you told one of the workers working on the Mustang line what a Mustang would sell for in 2023 they would have laughed at you!

Made there on parts, not now outsourced that's where quality dropped..

The whole thing is miraculous. But what a horrible horrible job working on an assembly line.

No wimps need apply.

Fix Or Repair Daily got it's birth in these plants, meanwhile at GM real cars were being made.

THEY WORE NO MASK

It was a horrible place to work equally as bad as chevy and dodge. Sometimes big paychecks doesn't mean a good place to work.

Noisiest video award!

Modern electric vehicles are so much easier to build than the cars of this era. They didn't even mention the transmission but the engine alone is a nightmare to construct. EVs will, in the next few years be much cheaper than gasoline vehicles. The narrator was proud to mention how these vehicles could last 100,000 miles. 😂

Now, in the mighty Rouge Plant in 2023, the glass plant is gone. The Coke ovens are gone. The Ford ship's are gone. The Spec Foundry is gone. The metal foundry where engine blocks and valve head assemblies were made is gone. Even the steel plant is no longer owned by Ford. The Ford locomotive shop and all the locomotives that moved everything throughout the Rouge Plant are gone. The mighty Rouge Plant is just a mere shadow - a ghost of what it used to be. This video shows you viewers what USED to be in the mighty Rouge Plant. All gone to China and other overseas countries. Vehicles built cheaper but sold back to customers at a higher dollar to give the executives at the glass house Ford headquarters more millions of dollar's in their pockets and wives purses, along with more money in their Swiss Bank accounts and other off shore bank accounts. Along with all those jobs sent overseas and parts being made in China, Ford has MORE vehicle recalls than any auto manufacturer in the world. Yep, Ford is a four letter word. It begins with the first letter "F." But it doesn't end with the letter 'D'. You fill in the last three letters. Hint: it rimes with the word "fork." A word you don't want your children or grandchildren using in public.

Thunderbird, the ugliest car ever built