The 20 Millionth Ford: A 1931 Model A on Tour

Most collectors know the Model A as the car that put Ford back on its feet after the Model T, a story told at length in our Model A history story. This one is narrower. It is about a single sedan, a single serial number, and what happened when Ford sent it out to meet the country.

The 20 millionth Ford: which car it was

The car was a 1931 Model A Town Sedan, painted black, with the slant windshield that arrived on some closed Fords that year. Ford Garage identifies the body as a 160-B, one of the 1931 slant-windshield Fordor codes. List price for a 1931 Town Sedan was $630, f.o.b. Detroit, near the top of the Model A range that year. Ford could have picked a roadster or a cheap Tudor for the job. It picked a well-trimmed family sedan, the car most buyers wanted to be seen in.

The milestone was Ford's running total, not a count of Model As alone: more than 15 million of those cars were Model Ts. Ford had done this twice before: a 10 millionth Ford in June 1924, a Model T that toured the Lincoln Highway, and a 15 millionth Ford in May 1927, the touring car Henry and Edsel drove off the Highland Park line in the last days of the Model T. So the 20 millionth was the third car in a series, and the first Model A to carry the honor.

A serial number with stars on it

Here is the part a club man loves. A Model A carries its number stamped on the engine and on the frame. On this car both were stamped A20000000, with a star at each end. The engine number went on at 9:55 a.m. on April 1, 1931, after its run-in test, two weeks before the finished car came down the line. It is the only Model A numbered that way.

That matters more than it sounds. Plenty of cars claim to have been "the one Henry drove" or "the dealer's showroom car." Very few can prove it. This one has its proof cut into the iron.

On tour, coast to coast

Ford sent the car out east to west across the United States, traveling with as many as 20 other 1931 Fords. The account in the Model A club's magazine, The Restorer, in its May/June 2001 issue, gives the details. States issued special license plates reading 20,000,000. People who drove it along the way included Eleanor Roosevelt, Douglas Fairbanks and Admiral Richard E. Byrd. It took a checkered flag at Indianapolis. It was the first car outside government service to reach the bottom of Hoover Dam.

Think about the timing. This was 1931. Ford's US car output that year fell to 541,615, about half of 1930, as the Depression bit hard. A tour like this was a way of telling a shaken public that Ford was still building, still moving, still worth a trip downtown to the dealer. No sales figure has ever been tied to the tour itself. It certainly got the name in the papers in every town it passed through.

By December 1931 the car was back in Detroit, and it went into the Henry Ford Museum. That same year was the last model year for the Model A; if you want to know why it ended, the short answer starts with a falling market and a new Ford coming for 1932.

"Every swap meet has a fellow with a car that toured somewhere with somebody. I always ask for the plate, the photo, the letter. This car is the rare one where the answer is stamped on the engine in stars."

Wayne Coburn

Where the car went next

This is where the record went quiet for decades. For years the story went round that the car had burned in a museum fire in the late 1930s. The 2001 Restorer article found that the museum curator had no record of a sale, or of a fire, and called the car's fate one of the great automotive mysteries.

The answer surfaced soon after. A Ford press release from 2002, quoted by Ford Garage, says the company had sold the car as surplus in the 1940s and that it had spent the years since in private hands in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, in the small town of Chassell. Ford leased it back from the owners, paid for a frame-off restoration by Terry Deters, and reintroduced it at Iola, Wisconsin, on July 12, 2002, ahead of the company's 2003 centennial. After the loan it went back to its private owners. One dealer account names the buyers as the Liimatainen family and puts the sale at $550 in 1940, but Ford's own release gives no name, year or price, and accounts differ on whether the car was found in the 1990s or in 2000.

For a collector this is the whole lesson in one car. Even a vehicle with a unique stamped serial, a famous maker and a national tour lost its chain of custody for half a century in a single quiet sale. A car with a number like that is worth a great deal more with documents than without them.

What the 20 millionth Ford tells us today

The Model A was built in the millions, and its story usually gets told in totals: about 4.85 million cars in all. The 20 millionth Ford is a reminder that the totals were made of single cars, and that Ford knew how to make one of them stand for all the rest.

It also shows how far the Model A's reach went. In 1931 Ford was opening new plants in England and Germany, and the design would go on to be built in the Soviet Union as the GAZ-A, which is the longer story of a Model A that outlived its own model years.

If you ever come across a black 1931 Town Sedan claiming to be this car, look under the hood and along the frame first. Then ask for the papers. The stars on the number are the beginning of the proof, not the end of it.

Sources and notes

• The Henry Ford: Ford Model A Fordor Town Sedan, the Twenty Millionth Ford Car, 1931
• Ford Garage: the 20 millionth Ford, serial, tour and 2002 restoration
• MAFCA, The Restorer, May/June 2001: the 20 millionth Ford
• The Golden Lamb: an unusual historic visitor
• Autopaper: 1931 press photo of the 20 millionth car on tour