The Biggest Failure of Ford Motor Company Under Henry Ford.

Ajouté : 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Stop me if you've heard this one. It's 1945 and you spent over $20 million on 2.5 million acres in the Brazilian rainforest. You started this whole mess in 1927, but after spending what in today's money would be close to 326 million dollars, you didn't produce enough rubber to make one tire. What now? Probably picked up that after getting horribly burned by the Dodge brothers, Ford really wanted to make sure that his entire supply chain was in-house. And at the time, rubber was one of the few things that Ford actually couldn't get control of. So, Ford tried to do the one thing that he did with every other supply piece in his supply chain. He wanted to bring it in-house and that meant that he had to go to the source and build his own rubber plantation. So, Ford bought 2.5 million acres of Brazilian rainforest and without even consulting a dendrologist, as a hard who likes trees, he planted close to 3.6 million rubber trees.

[00:01:06]Too close to each other.

[00:01:08]But don't worry, that was just one mistake. See, Ford didn't just set up a plantation and bring in his own people.

[00:01:15]No, he set up a plantation and then built an entire city around it which included a church, a hospital, a cafeteria, houses, fire hydrants, streets. He essentially brought the US to Brazil.

[00:01:32]The problem is is that the other thing that he brought from the US was his shitty ideas. Because Fordlandia was a mandatory alcohol-free, tobacco-free, soccer-free, I don't get that one, and unfortunately booty-free environment. Now, let's be clear. That didn't mean that you couldn't bring your wife and kids. You just had to leave your niece at home.

[00:01:56]So, as you can imagine, this didn't go over swimmingly with the locals who made a majority of the workforce. And some pretty good hooch. Now, unfortunately, by the 1930s, conditions for the staff at Fordlandia was getting rather oppressive. And by December of 1930, they had had enough and they rioted.

[00:02:19]Like burn that mother to the ground rioted.

[00:02:22]Which fortunately had the US Ford staff kind of lighten up on the locals.

[00:02:28]You know, so they don't die. Now, by the 1940s, you would assume that they would have actually started production. But no. See, remember how I said that they were planning the trees too close together? Well, there was an issue with that because when disease crept into one tree, it easily jumped to the next tree.

[00:02:49]If only they had hired anybody that knew about trees.