John Arthur Oldfield (13 January 1937 - September 2002) was a British engineer, and a former senior Ford executive and designer.

Early life

He was born in

Stepney Stepney is a district in the East End of London in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The district is no longer officially defined, and is usually used to refer to a relatively small area. However, for much of its history the place name appli ...

. His family moved soon after to

Essex Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and Grea ...

, and he had 4 younger siblings. He was the son of George Oldfield and Alice Bunker, who married in Essex in 1935. He attended the Cranfield Institute of Technology ( Cranfield University), gaining an MSc. Racing Ford Mondeo

Career

Ford

He joined Ford in 1958, at the age of 21. He became head of the £3bn design projectCases on Global IT Applications and Management: Successes and Pitfalls, Ford Mondeo: A Model T World Car?
/ref> for the

Ford Mondeo The Ford Mondeo is a large family car manufactured by Ford since 1993. The first Ford model declared as a " world car", the Mondeo was intended to consolidate several Ford model lines worldwide (the European Sierra, the Telstar in Asia and Aus ...

(CDW27) in May 1986 from Ford Dunton, which was launched in March 1993 at the Geneva Motor Show. The car was made at

Genk Body & Assembly ''Genk Body & Assembly'' was a Ford Motor Company automobile factory in Genk, Belgium, just over an hour to the west of the company's European head office in Cologne, Germany. The site spanned . The plant employed approx 4,300 workers in 2014. T ...

Genk Genk () is a city and municipality located in the Belgian province of Limburg near Hasselt. The municipality only comprises the town of Genk itself. It is one of the most important industrial towns in Flanders, located on the Albert Canal, ...

, Belgium, which was to produce around 350,000 a year. At its peak, the Mondeo design team at the

Dunton Technical Centre The Dunton Campus (informally Ford Dunton or Dunton) is a major automotive research and development facility located in Dunton Wayletts, Laindon, Essex, United Kingdom owned and operated by Ford Motor Company. As Ford's European headquarters, ...

and Merkenich in Germany had 800 engineers. He was head of Mondeo design for six years up to its launch. The design for the Mondeo was agreed at the Merkenich Technical Centre in Cologne. American teams worked on the air conditioning and the automatic gearboxes, and European teams worked on the manual gearboxes. The

Ford Zeta engine Developed in the late 1980s by the Ford Motor Company, the Ford Zeta engine was a straight-4, double overhead cam internal combustion engine with which Ford had intended to replace the analogous Pinto and CVH models. Ford designed the Zeta to sh ...

was developed for the Mondeo. Ford at Dagenham had lost production of the Sierra in 1989 (moving to Genk), although it still made the

Ford Fiesta (third generation) The Ford Fiesta Mk3 was the third generation of the Ford Fiesta supermini built by Ford Europe. Originally introduced in 1989, the Mk3 represented the biggest change to the Fiesta since the original car was introduced in 1976. In addition to th ...

(its 7,000 workers were making around 240,000 a year in the early 1990s). The Sierra would sell 1.3m in the UK. He became head of New Products at Ford of Europe in the early 1990s. Ford in the UK is headquartered at

Warley, Essex Warley is a suburb of Brentwood, Essex, Brentwood in Essex, situated to the south of the town. It was notable for being home to the British headquarters of Ford Motor Company prior to their office closure. It is also home to a development of hou ...

, off the B186, south of Brentwood.

Aston Martin

In February 1994 he became Executive Chairman of Aston Martin in Newport Pagnell, then owned by Ford. Under his chairmanship, production of hand-crafted Aston Martins went from 150 a year to 700 a year. He oversaw the development of the

Aston Martin DB7 The Aston Martin DB7 is a grand tourer which was produced by British luxury automobile manufacturer Aston Martin from September 1994 to December 2004. The car was available either as a coupé or a convertible. The prototype was complete by Nov ...

. He retired on 22 October 1995, due to cancer, having worked for Ford for 37 years; he had been Executive Chairman for twenty months. Inside the

automobile industry The automotive industry comprises a wide range of companies and organizations involved in the design, development, manufacturing, marketing, and selling of motor vehicles. It is one of the world's largest industries by revenue (from 16 % such ...

he was known as ''Mr Mondeo''.

Personal life

In his later years, he lived at

Boreham Boreham is a village and civil parish, in Essex, England. The parish is in the City of Chelmsford and Chelmsford Parliament constituency. The village is approximately northeast from the county town of Chelmsford. History Boreham is listed i ...

, north-east of Chelmsford. He died in the

City of Chelmsford The City of Chelmsford () is a local government district in Essex, England. It is named after its main settlement, Chelmsford, which is also the county town of Essex. On 1 June 2012 Chelmsford was granted city status to mark the Diamond Jub ...

district in 2002, due to motor neurone disease.

References