Model A

Why the Model A exists

By the mid-1920s the Model T had been in production since 1908 and the market had moved past it. Hagerty's account is that sales were faltering even as Ford cut the price each year, and that Edsel Ford and the board pushed Henry Ford to change course. When he relented, he did it his way: Model T production stopped in May 1927 with no replacement ready, Mac's Motor City Garage records 60,000 people put out of work, and dealers spent the summer and fall with nothing new to sell. Gene Farkas ran the engineering with Lawrence Sheldrick and Frank Johnson, and Edsel Ford supervised the styling himself, working with body engineer Joe Galamb. Motor Age's verdict on the finished car was that it was not a remade Model T but a new automobile built on the lessons of 15,000,000 earlier ones.

The launch

The first car was built on October 20, 1927. The Henry Ford museum notes where it went: Henry Ford gave it to Thomas Edison, and the engine in it still carries the stamp A-1. The press saw the car on November 30, and Motor Age reported 46 major public displays opening December 2 across the US, Canada and England, with an advertising appropriation said to total $15,000,000. How many people came to look depends on who is counting, and the estimates are set out in the claims below. In New York, Motor Age reported, Ford hired Madison Square Garden to show the cars day and night.

What buyers got for $385 to $570

The opening line was six bodies: Roadster $385, Phaeton and roadster pickup $395, Tudor and coupe $495, Sport Coupe $550 and Fordor $570, with the truck chassis at $460. Bumpers were $15, fitted on the line, and a dealer took them off if the buyer did not want them. The engine was rated at 40 hp at 2,200 rpm, Ford claimed 20 to 30 mpg and a top speed between 55 and 65 mph, and fuel fell by gravity from a tank in the cowl. Buyers who had learned to drive on a Model T's pedals now had a clutch, a brake and a gear lever in the places every other make used.

Four model years, more than twenty bodies

MAFCA's price table shows the range filling in year by year: the Town Sedan, Cabriolet, Taxi and $1,200 Town Car for 1929, the De Luxe Phaeton, Roadster and Coupe and the Victoria for 1930, and the De Luxe Tudor and Convertible Sedan for 1931. One million had been sold by February 4, 1929 and two million by July 24 of that year. The Model AA truck shared the engine, added a four-speed gearbox, and was later built under license in the Soviet Union, where GAZ produced more than 985,000. The Model A gave way to the four-cylinder Model B and the V8 for 1932.

The clubs

In the early 1950s a Model A was just an old Ford. William E. Hall went to an antique car meet in the fall of 1952 where Model As were barred from parking with the antiques, and he responded by inviting five enthusiasts to his West Hartford, Connecticut home to form the Model A Restorers Club. MARC believes it was the first American club devoted to a single make and single model. In October 1955, fifteen Southern California owners, many of them MARC members, met at Red Grow's Auto Sales lot in Glendale and formed a regional club; it began publishing The Restorer in May 1956 and, after the 1957 MARC national convention, broke away as the Model A Ford Club of America. Both clubs are still publishing, judging and touring.

The Model A's faults are well documented because two clubs have spent seventy years answering the same questions. The rear main bearing is poured babbitt, and MAFCA's technical answers put nearly every rear oil leak down to a cracked rear main babbitt or wear clearance, warning that aftermarket rear seals that require grinding a groove in the crankshaft tend to fail. Overheating is the second recurring complaint, and the club's first suspect is the radiator: a period-correct core has three rows of tubes, some replacement radiators had two, fins work loose and stop shedding heat, and old radiators silt up. Timing, an over-rich mixture and a leaking head gasket are the next checks, and a new head gasket may need retorquing several times after warm-up. Rusted-in cylinder head studs are common enough that the club advises soaking and a heavy-duty stud puller, and never prying between head and block, which cracks the head. Original two-blade fans should be inspected for internal rust and fatigue cracks. None of these are expensive in parts, and Hagerty describes the parts support as vast; the cost is labor, and no fetched source publishes a US dollar figure for a full engine rebuild or a body-off restoration, so none is given here.

Start with the body, because the body sets the value and the chassis is shared. MAFCA's production table and its body style codes identify what a car should be: a 1931-only Convertible Sedan is a 400-A, a Town Car a 140-A or 140-B, a De Luxe Phaeton a 180-A, and the club publishes how to tell a Briggs body from a Murray body. Claims of a rare body on a common chassis are worth checking against those numbers, since a Tudor outnumbers a Town Car by more than a thousand to one. The Victoria came with a fabric back and a later metal back, and Ford's own 1931 letter notes the metal-back car is 62 lb lighter, so the two are different cars to a judge. On the engine, oil at the rear of the block is the classic Model A complaint; a MAFCA technical director attributes almost all rear oil leaks to a cracked rear main babbitt bearing or excess wear clearance there, not to a missing modern seal. A compression check tells you where the rings and valves stand; the club's technical answers expect new rings to bring a healthy engine up to about 55 psi. The cooling system should hold about 1-1/2 gallons in the radiator and 3 gallons in all, and a replacement radiator with two rows of tubes instead of three is a known cause of overheating. The parts supply means almost anything can be fixed, so the real questions are the quality of the bodywork and wood, whether the car has been modified, and whether a judged restoration is documented by a MARC or MAFCA award.

As of September 2026 classic.com puts its market benchmark for the Ford Model A at $18,393 and the average price at $18,732, with a recorded low of $550 for a 1931 sedan sold on September 7, 2022. classic.com does not separate body styles in that headline figure, and the body is what moves the price. Hagerty's 2020 market piece, written by Kyle Smith with Hagerty Price Guide specialist Hawk Hawkins, put a #1 condition Town Car at $55,000 and a #1 business coupe or Tudor in the low $20,000 range, noted that most cars sit in #3 condition, and found that 72 percent of quotes came from pre-boomer and baby boomer owners. RM Sotheby's results give individual US data points: a 1931 Roadster sold for $22,000 at Auburn Fall 2018 and a 1930 Roadster for the same $22,000 at Auburn Fall 2019; a 1990s-restored 1930 Roadster sold for $28,000 at the Arizona 2023 sale; and a 1930 roadster pickup from the Gene Ponder Collection brought $45,100 in 2022. The lot pages show a single sold figure and do not say whether it includes buyer's premium. Read together, these few results suggest a pattern: common closed cars trade in the high teens, good open cars in the twenties, and the rare bodies, commercial conversions and exceptional restorations above that.