Ford: America's "Big One"

So we've all heard of America's "Big Three" automotive companies; Ford, Chevrolet and Dodge. But what if in an alternate timeline Dodge and Cadillac were part of Ford, significantly reducing competition and making America's automotive culture dedicated to one domestic brand? What if Ford was America's "Big One", the only major player in the American car market?
== The Henry Ford Company Era (1901-1902) ==
The Henry Ford Company was the second company for Henry Ford, founded November 1901. It resulted from the reorganization of the Detroit Automobile Company, his first unsuccessful attempt at automobile manufacture a year before. In March 1902, Ford threatened to leave the company following a dispute with his financial backers and Lemuel Bowen, as Ford was devoting considerable time to the sport of auto racing and his Ford 999 race car. In a final settlement, Ford stayed with the company, although losing one of his financial backers, William Murphy. Ford, needing another backer to take Murphy's place, started placing ads for someone interested in helping build the company.
=== The Beginning Of Cadillac, Henry M. Leland Steps In (1902) ===
Henry M. Leland was born to Leander and Zilpha, the youngest of 8, in Vermont in 1843. Sources differ on the town of his birth (Danville versus Barton); he grew up in Barton. He learned engineering and precision machining in the Brown & Sharpe plant at Providence, Rhode Island. He subsequently worked in the firearms industry, including at Colt. These experiences in toolmaking, metrology, and manufacturing steeped him in the 19th-century zeitgeist of interchangeability.
He applied this expertise to the nascent motor industry as early as 1870 as a principal in the machine shop Leland & Faulconer, and later was a supplier of engines to Ransom E. Olds's Olds Motor Vehicle Company, later to be known as Oldsmobile. He also invented the electric barber clippers, and for a short time produced a unique toy train, the Leland-Detroit Monorail.
Leland's interest in producing full automobiles led him to respond to Henry Ford's ad looking for a financial backer. Leland and Ford, after many hours of bargaining, made a deal that Leland would fully financially support the Henry Ford Motor Company, in exchange for the right to develop a luxury brand for Ford, one which would "sell luxury cars for an everyday price". They agreed to name the new brand Cadillac, which, due to the unprecedented and immediate success of the brand, soon after became a subsidiary of Ford's main company in 1903.
Initially the Cadillac name was applied for top trim option on The original Ford Model A, produced from 1903-1904. In August 1902, it began manufacturing the Ford Model A Runabouts and named the trim option on the ordering sheet the "Cadillac" trim package, after the city's founder Antoine Laumet, the self-styled Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac.
When the production of the Model A began in March 1903 and output of the "Cadillac" trim package totaled an unprecedented 1,750 units from March 1903 to March 1904, Henry Ford decided to let Leland form Cadillac as it's own subsidiary of Ford, producing it's own cars, and not just leave it a luxury trim package on Ford's own cars.
The 2-seater top-of-the-line "runabout" packaged Model A cost $750; an optional rear entrance detachable tonneau cost $100 and doubled the occupant capacity. The entire body was bolted to the chassis and could be lifted without removing or disconnecting any plumbing or wiring.
Cadillacs of 1903 sometimes are misidentified as the regular Model A; when in fact, they were known simply as the "Cadillac Runabout" and the "Cadillac Tonneau" when ordering.
== Ford Motor Company (1903-Present) ==
After the founding of the Henry Ford Company's luxury subsidiary, Cadillac Motor Car Company, Ford went on to rename his new parent company to Ford Motor Company in 1903 and move the Ford brand's production to the Ford Mack Avenue Plant, leaving the now Cadillac Assembly Plant on Amsterdam Street, which was now dedicated to the luxury Cadillac brand.
The original Ford Model A is the first car produced by Ford, beginning production in 1903. Ernest Pfennig, a Chicago dentist, became the first owner of a Model A on July 23, 1903; 1,895 cars were made from 1903 through 1904, the vast majority of which, 1,750 to be precise, were sold with the "Cadillac" luxury trim package.
Category:Ford: America's "Big One"