Ford Model A

Overview

Ford built two cars called the Model A. The first was a two-cylinder runabout of 1903, the company's first product. This is the other one: the car that replaced the Model T after nineteen years, and the car that had to save Ford Motor Company after the T was left to go stale. Henry Ford's answer was drastic. He built the last Model T on 26 May 1927, then shut the factories and stopped selling cars while the largest manufacturer in the world retooled around a machine that shared not one part with its predecessor. Assembly moved from Highland Park to the River Rouge, 53,000 machine tools of new design went in, and Hagerty puts the bill at around $100 million in 1927 dollars. Chevrolet finished the year ahead of Ford, and Ford's share of the market fell below ten percent. The Model A, first built on 20 October and shown to the public on 2 December 1927, won the ground back: forty horsepower instead of twenty, a clutch and a three-speed gearbox instead of the T's pedals, four-wheel brakes, and laminated safety glass in the windshield as standard. By the time it ended, 4,858,644 had been built.

Distinctions

The defining attributes and collector status that make this car garage-worthy.

Legend

A car that transcended the hobby, known far beyond the people who drive them.

Octane Files Select

Renowned for its history, engineering, or cultural weight.

Collectibility scorecard

Rated 1 to 10 on the traits that matter for owning, driving, and holding on to a car like this.

Desirability

7/10

Rarity

3/10

Driving thrill

5/10

Investment trajectory

4/10

Usability

5/10

Ease of restoration

9/10

Cultural impact

8/10

Electronic dependence

Fully analogHeavily electronic

Nothing on a Model A is electronic and very little of it is even electrical. Ignition is a battery-fed coil and a breaker-point distributor, which was itself the modernisation over the Model T's flywheel magneto. The six-volt system runs the starter, the generator and its cut-out, the headlamps and the horn, and that is the complete list. Fuel reaches the single-throat updraft carburettor by gravity from the cowl tank, so there is no pump to power. The brakes are rods and levers to four drums with no hydraulics anywhere. Every driver input is a direct mechanical connection to the thing it operates.

Market data

Demand tier, price trend, and typical values by condition. Our own assessment, not a quoted valuation.

Demand tier

EntrySolidHighBlue-chip

A dependable market. Well-kept cars hold their value and find ready buyers.

Value trajectory

AppreciatingStableCooling

Values are holding steady. What you pay today is what it's worth tomorrow.

Price by condition

Driver

$12k

Excellent

$24k

Concours

$45k

Values sit where a car built nearly five million times has to sit: accessible, and steady rather than climbing. Closed cars have been level for years, with classic.com's average across all Model A sales at $18,981 and 1931 cars averaging $23,907. Open bodies are the exception that carries the market, with 1931 roadsters averaging $42,089, and the DeLuxe and A400 cars above that again. The one genuinely hot corner is the period-correct hot rod, which regularly clears $60,000 and answers to a different set of buyers entirely. The tier is Solid rather than High because this is the entry door to pre-war ownership rather than a blue-chip asset, and the fact that almost anybody can afford one is the point rather than a weakness.

Values as of August 2026.

Buyer's guide

What anyone seriously considering this car should know first.

Why it's worth it

The car that had to rescue Ford from the Model T, and the body American hot rodding was built on

Callout

Ford stopped building cars entirely for roughly six months in 1927 to retool for this one car

What to watch for

Learn the two halves of the run before you shop. The 1928 and 1929 cars ride on 21-inch wheels with a short nickel-plated radiator shell and matching headlamps. The 1930 and 1931 cars got 19-inch wheels, a taller stainless shell with a painted lower insert, deeper fenders and bigger hubcaps, and most people find them the better looking car. Mechanically the two halves are near-identical, so buy on condition and body style rather than year. Condition means three things here. First the engine: the mains and rods run on poured babbitt, cast in place and machined to size, so a bearing job is a specialist's work rather than a box of inserts. Ask when it was last done and who did it. Second, wood. Briggs and Murray framed the closed bodies in timber, and rot behind good paint is the expensive surprise. Third, the cowl, because on a Model A the fuel tank is the cowl, sitting between hood and windshield, painted outside and effectively impossible to inspect inside. A rusty one is a known job rather than a deal-breaker, but price it in. Beyond that, assume any Model A has been apart more than once, and check that its parts all came from the same year.

The Story

Driving character

After a Model T this feels like a car, which is exactly what it was meant to feel like. There is a clutch pedal on the left, a brake in the middle, a throttle on the right and a gear lever in the floor, which in 1928 was Ford finally conceding that the rest of the industry had been right all along. The box is a three-speed sliding-gear unit with no synchromesh at all, so you double-declutch on the way down and take your time on the way up, and the change into second is the one that tells everybody watching whether you have driven one before. The 200.5-cubic-inch four makes 40 horsepower at 2,200rpm and 120 lb-ft down at 1,000, which means it pulls willingly from almost nothing and then runs out of enthusiasm early. Forty-five to fifty is a comfortable cruise and the claimed 65 feels like the honest limit. The four-wheel mechanical brakes work through rods and levers, and they stop the car properly when they are adjusted properly, which is a real skill and a regular job. The steering is slow, the ride is tall and soft, and the whole thing is far more relaxing than the numbers suggest.

Design

The Model A is Edsel Ford's car, and the quickest way to understand it is to stand a 1928 Ford next to a Lincoln L-Series. The radiator shell, the fender line and the general proportions are the Lincoln's, scaled down and simplified, which is why buyers started calling the new Ford a baby Lincoln almost immediately. Henry Ford had no interest in styling and had spent nineteen years proving it. His son had spent those same years running Lincoln and had learned exactly what a car should look like, and handing him the body was the second big decision of the changeover after the mechanical one. The 1928 and 1929 cars wear the purest version of it: nickel-plated shell and headlamps, tall narrow 21-inch wheels, short fenders. For 1930 the car was restyled to sit lower and look wider without touching the chassis, gaining 19-inch wheels, a taller stainless shell with a painted lower insert and a blue Ford oval, deeper crowned fenders and larger hubcaps. Colour, which the Model T went without for a decade, was there from the first day. The DeLuxe cars added leather, walnut-grained interior wood and brighter trim.

Motorsport pedigree

Ford ran no competition programme for the Model A and there was never any prospect of one. The company had just spent roughly six months and something in the region of $100 million rebuilding itself around a car it needed to sell in millions, and a 40-horsepower economy Ford aimed at farmers and shopkeepers had nothing to prove on a race track and no budget to prove it with. Henry Ford's own racing story was already twenty years behind him, made with the 999 and the Arrow before the Model T existed, and Ford's next serious factory effort would not arrive until the Miller-Ford Indianapolis cars of 1935. What happened instead is the more interesting story. The Model A's 200.5-cubic-inch four turned out to be an outstanding racing block, and an aftermarket grew up building overhead-valve and overhead-cam conversions for it: Riley, Cragar, Miller, Rajo. Cars running those heads dominated American dirt-track racing through the 1930s and into the 1940s, and fenderless Model A roadsters ran the Southern California dry lakes at Muroc and El Mirage under SCTA timing. The car never raced as Ford built it. It raced constantly as everybody else built it.

In culture

The Model A is the body American hot rodding was built on. Take the fenders off a 1929 roadster, drop in the flathead V8 that arrived with the 1932 Ford, and you have the A-V8, the most repeated recipe in the hobby, and the car itself is an A-bone to anybody who has ever run one. When the Oakland Roadster Show handed out the first America's Most Beautiful Roadster trophy in 1950 it went to William NieKamp's 1929 Ford, and Model A roadsters have kept turning up in the winners list ever since. The launch was its own cultural event, on a scale no car has managed since. Ford spent two million dollars on a five-day advertising blitz across 2,000 newspapers, and when the doors opened on 2 December 1927 an estimated one million people saw the car in New York while 100,000 walked through the Detroit showroom. It travelled further than that, too. Under a technical agreement signed in May 1929, Ford helped build a plant at Nizhny Novgorod, and from January 1932 the Model A was assembled there as the NAZ-A, renamed GAZ-A in 1933, with more than 100,000 built before it ended in 1936.

Rivals

Cars from other manufacturers that competed for the same buyers when new.

Chevrolet International AC

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Plymouth Model Q

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Chevrolet Series AB National

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Willys Whippet

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Owning One

Why collectors want it

The Model A is the most usable pre-war car there is, and that is most of the argument. Where a Model T asks you to unlearn driving, a Model A only asks you to be patient. Clutch, three-speed box, four-wheel brakes, 65mph if the road is kind. You can take it on a club tour and keep up with the others. The market then sorts itself by body and by roof. Closed cars carry the volume and set the floor: the Standard Tudor alone accounts for 1,387,270 of the 4,858,644 built, and a sound, sorted one is among the cheapest genuine pre-war cars in the hobby. Open cars take the premium, and classic.com's average for a 1931 roadster of $42,089 sits at close to double the $23,907 average across all 1931 Model As. Above those sit the rarities: 60,715 Cabriolets, 42,310 Victorias, 5,085 A400 Convertible Sedans, 1,198 Town Cars. And then there is the parallel market nobody at Ford planned, where a well-built A-V8 hot rod regularly outruns a restored original on price. Three different cars, one chassis, and the cheapest of them still does everything the expensive one does.

Which one to look for

Body style is the whole decision here, because the chassis and engine underneath never changed, and that holds across the passenger cars, the roadster pickup and the closed-cab pickup alike. Ford offered roughly two dozen configurations and MAFCA's production tables let you rank them honestly. The Standard Tudor is the default Model A at 1,387,270 built, the cheapest way in and the one most people learn on. The Standard Coupe at 573,703 and the Fordor sedans are the same proposition with a different roof. Open cars are where the money moves: the Standard Roadster at 422,354 is both the enthusiast's choice and the hot rodder's donor, and the Standard Phaeton at 209,943 is the four-seat version of the same idea. The DeLuxe line is genuinely rarer than its reputation suggests, at 68,335 DeLuxe Roadsters and 7,281 DeLuxe Phaetons. The grail list is short. The Cabriolet, 60,715 built, gives you an open car with wind-up windows and a rumble seat. The Victoria, 42,310, is the prettiest closed body Ford put on the chassis. The A400 Convertible Sedan was a 1931-only car and ran to 5,085. The chauffeur-bodied Town Car, faintly absurd on a Ford, ran to 1,198.

A400 Convertible Sedan · 1931

A 1931-only DeLuxe body: four doors, wind-up windows and a folding top, with leather trim and walnut-grained interior wood. The rarest regular-production Model A and the one that heads most want lists.

Cabriolet · 1929–1931

An open car with wind-up windows, a proper padded top and a rumble seat as standard: the roadster for people who wanted weather protection without buying a sedan. Introduced in March 1929.

DeLuxe Phaeton · 1930–1931

The four-seat open car in DeLuxe trim, and one of the genuinely scarce Model A bodies. Overlooked next to the roadsters, which is part of the appeal.

DeLuxe Roadster · 1930–1931

The 1930 restyle brought a DeLuxe line, and the DeLuxe Roadster is its most wanted member: brighter trim, better interior materials, and a good deal rarer than the Standard car it sits beside.

Fordor Sedan · 1928–1931

The four-door family car, and the most complicated part of the Model A range to keep straight. Ford sold Leatherback and Steelback versions in 1928 and 1929, then dropped both for 1930 in favour of two-window and three-window Standard and DeLuxe cars, plus the Town Sedan.

Sport Coupe · 1928–1931

A coupe with a fabric-covered roof insert and landau irons on the rear quarters, giving the closed body a hint of the cabriolet. Popular when new and often confused with the Standard Coupe today.

Standard Coupe · 1928–1931

The Tudor's proposition with a shorter roof and a rumble seat behind. Business, Special and DeLuxe coupes ran alongside it at various points, but the Standard is the volume car of the coupe family.

Standard Phaeton · 1928–1931

The four-seat open car: no side glass, a folding top and doors cut low. The touring body in the Model T sense, and the one that looks most like the 1920s from twenty feet away.

Standard Roadster · 1928–1931

Two seats, a folding top, side curtains rather than windows, and the lightest body Ford offered on the chassis. The enthusiast's Model A and, since roughly 1945, the single most modified body in American hot rodding.

Standard Tudor Sedan · 1928–1931

The default Model A and the one most owners start with. Two doors, a fixed steel roof and room for four, sold in every one of the four model years. Cheap when new, cheap now, and the body that sets the floor of the market.

Station Wagon · 1929–1931

Ford's wood-bodied wagon, added for 1929 and built in tiny numbers next to everything else. The ancestor of every American woodie, and the body with the highest restoration cost in the range because the structure is the bodywork.

Town Car

A chauffeur-driven body with an open front compartment and an enclosed rear, listed at up to $1,400 when a roadster cost $385. Ordering one on a Ford chassis was always a slightly odd thing to do, which is exactly why so few exist.

Victoria · 1930–1931

Introduced with the 1930 restyle and the prettiest closed body Ford put on the Model A chassis: a close-coupled two-door with a sharply sloped rear roofline. Sits above the Tudor in both looks and money.

What owning one is like

Nothing on a Model A is mysterious, which is most of the reason to own one. The things that go wrong go wrong in public and get fixed over a weekend. The mechanical brakes need adjusting and re-adjusting, and they do work, but they work as a set, so a car pulling to one side under braking is a car whose rods want attention rather than a car with a fault. The engine has no oil filter and no full-pressure system, which makes oil changes the whole maintenance schedule, and a hard-worked car will eventually want its babbitt poured again. Fuel arrives by gravity from the cowl tank, so there is no pump to fail and a sediment bowl to clean instead. Six volts is plenty for the starter and the headlamps and not much else, and it will make you patient about where you park at night. Wood-framed closed bodies rot from the bottom up, roadster floors take water, and 19 and 21-inch rims narrow your tyre choices. Owners who tour theirs all report the same thing: the shakedown mileage finds the problems, and after that the car simply goes.

Upkeep & parts

Parts availability is close to absolute. Between MAFCA, the Model A Restorers Club and a reproduction industry that has never once stopped, essentially every part of a Model A is available new, and people have assembled complete running cars out of catalogues. Budget accordingly, because routine work sits in the low hundreds rather than the thousands. Two jobs want money and a specialist. Poured babbitt bearings need a machine shop that still does the work, and body wood on the closed cars comes as pre-cut kits but takes real time to fit. Everything else is within reach of a competent amateur with a manual and a free Saturday. The club support is the genuine asset here. The Model A Ford Club of America and the Model A Restorers Club have between them documented the running changes across four model years down to fastener finishes, publish judging standards and run technical libraries. That documentation is also why originality is enforceable on a Model A in a way it is not on most cars of the period. Somebody can tell you that your 1930 car is wearing a 1931 part, and somebody will.