(gentle upbeat music)
- The evening of June 17, 1994
was the most impactful moment
in the history of the Bronco Brand.
(cheerful music)
- Lightning fast and bizarre
developments tonight,
in the OJ Simpson story,
we're seeing live pictures right now,
the football hero
believed to be a passenger
in that Ford Bronco-
- That that night was the
slow speed police chase
of the white Bronco that changed America.
- Detectives from the Los
Angeles Police Department,
sought and obtained for
the arrest of OJ Simpson,
charging him with the murders
of Nicole Brown Simpson
and Ronald Lyle Goldman.
- You can't talk about the Bronco
without talking about this moment.
In fact, for many people,
this is the only thing
they know about the Bronco,
it was a defining moment.
- Lots of questions still
swirling around the case,
but still no comment on reports
that a bloody ski mask and glove
were found on Simpson's Estate.
- But did it kill the Bronco?
Is the negative publicity
and the horrible connotations
of being associated with a violent crime,
the reason Ford canceled the
brand just two years later?
That's what we're going to find out.
(gentle music)
(gentle upbeat music)
I'm Sonari Glinton, and
this is Bring Back Bronco,
an eight part serial documentary
about the rise, fall, and
rebirth of the Ford Bronco,
and right now we are all about the fall.
We spent the last three
episodes trying to figure out
why Ford killed the Bronco.
Bronco to the OPEC oil
crisis, even Chevrolet,
all took their shots
at it, but it survived.
Which leads us to the most high
profile suspect on our list,
OJ Simpson, is he the real killer?
(gentle music)
This is chapter 4, The End of the Road.
Football fans, Ford Bronco fans,
fans of "The Naked Gun" movies,
everyone saw the chase
a little differently.
But what about the Ford employees?
What was going on inside Ford that night?
Well, I've got a bit of an inside scoop,
on that night, I was a skinny
20 year old college student
making 15.09 an hour, working on the line
at the Chicago Assembly Plant.
I worked on the assembly line,
with this a great group of people.
It was just like really fun I remember
they tried to teach me the tire install
there's a big machine,
you ride it up against,
and that secures the bolt into the tire.
And then you go to the next one,
put the five bolts in,
the machine comes along and put that in,
and every other car you have to throw
the spare into the trunk.
Then I just remember,
having like one Popeye arm
from throwing the one tire.
(gentle upbeat music)
- Thing that I remember most about
that summer is so clear was
watching TV in the Oasis,
and that's what they
called the snack room,
and I'll never forget
watching on the screen
inside of a Ford plant everyone.
I remember when we were
talking on the line
about when Ron Goldman and
Nicole Simpson were murdered,
that was the whole line,
talk about it, right?
But during that chase,
I remember a guy doing
"better buy Ford stock, look at that,
"that's a commercial, that's
a commercial for the Bronco."
But was it a commercial for the Bronco?
What exactly was the impact on the brand,
(gentle upbeat music)
The value of a brand and what impacts it
is really hard to pin down.
So I called up Karl Brauer,
he's one of the best automotive
analysts in the business.
When I was an automotive
reporter with NPR,
I could always go to Karl for answers
to those really tough questions.
Questions like, what
happens when your truck
is driven on national TV,
by a man accused of murder.
- Those are things that
raise awareness of the name
and up the brand more than they raise
a negative connotation with the brand.
And there's no such
thing as bad publicity,
I mean, there really
is almost no such thing
as bad awareness in most markets
and certainly in the automotive market.
- Without a doubt, the wall
to wall television coverage,
put the name Bronco on
the lips of everyone,
but is that really a good thing?
- Well, I think it's positive
when you consider the fact
that someone chose a Bronco
as his potential getaway vehicle, right?
I mean, he wasn't in
some small economy car,
he wasn't even in a sports
car, he was in a Bronco.
- Which I always thought was kinda fitting
because the TV commercials from 1966,
always boasted the Bronco was perfect
for getting away from it all.
- The Bronco will really
take you off the beaten path
away from the crowd.
(gentle music)
- I guess some people took that a little
more literally than others.
So, I know what it looked like
from inside a Ford factory,
but what about in the offices,
where they're really
executives running around
with the hair on fire?
Well, apparently no.
I mean, it would have been fun to see.
You see, it was 7:00 PM in
Detroit, it was a Friday,
the offices were pretty empty.
The only place where
things were going crazy,
the customer call center.
- The center was open from 8:00
AM to 8:00 PM, as I recall.
(phone ringing)
- That's Robert Parker, in
the future he's gonna a role
in the struggle to revive Bronco,
but for now he's just a
supervisor in Ford's call center.
- The center had over 200
agents answering calls,
fielding calls from the United States.
It really ran the gamut
from your standard questions
to the weird and the wacky.
- But today was the weirdest
and wackiest of all.
(phone ringing)
- Calls started streaming in,
people started calling us,
asking us if we were
watching what was unfolding,
on the freeways of Los Angeles.
- Keep in mind, there's no social media
for people to post comments to,
so instead, and this may seem odd today,
they call Ford's customer hotline.
- So I started having our
customer service representatives
that were coming and asking
me if I knew anything about it
and what they should say to people.
- Now, this might be a
good time to point out
that while Robert was the supervisor,
this was his second day on the job.
- Certainly wasn't involved
in any part of your training,
and it wasn't something that any one of us
had encountered before.
- There wasn't much
that he could tell them
because the people calling
in knew more than he did.,
(gentle music)
- At the time there weren't
televisions in the office,
there wasn't the internet,
so some people were huddled around radios
trying to get information,
making outbound calls to friends,
trying to get information.
But we were a bit in the
dark about what was going on
and how that related to a Bronco
and how that related
to Ford Motor Company.
- The call volume was so high
that Robert ended up
staying late that night.
So despite being in the
middle of the storm,
he actually never saw
any of the chase live.
- I just always thought a bizarre
that Bronco got so much
coverage out of it,
it's like, I wonder if it
would have been a Camry,
if anybody would have ever remembered
more even or even a luxury car,
but for some reason, the
fact that it was a Bronco
made it so much more memorable.
(upbeat music)
- Over the years, I've wondered
what the chase meant for Bronco sales.
So I put that question
to Bailey Sisoy-Moore,
our favorite history expert.
- It did have a huge
effect on Bronco sales.
- Well, what was the effect?
- It went all up.
- Hold on a second,
say that one more time,
which means that is a surprise.
So immediately after the Bronco comes out.
- Yeah, for about three
months after the J's,
Bronco sales saw a peak,
you also had people doing things
like showing up at the dealerships
to take photos in the cars.
I mean, this was considered this big deal
and you almost have to equate it to
Bonnie and Clyde with their Dodge
or the Model T with John Dillinger,
these cars become
synonymous with the crime
and sort of inseparable from
that crime in the future.
So it does, it becomes as
big a part of Americana.
- I'm not gonna lie when Bailey said
that Bronco sales went up after the chase,
I was a little shocked.
I started out asking if
that had killed the Bronco
and she's saying, it gave it a boost.
So does that mean Ford
made money off the chase?
That kind of information
though only exists
inside of Ford offices.
So I reached out to David Scott,
he was the head of Ford's
public affairs department
at the time.
- We in the public affairs community
received a number of calls,
but it was mostly from the news media
asking about specifications of the Bronco,
what is the Bronco?
How many do you sell a year?
What's the wheelbase?
What's the engine kinda stuff.
- That doesn't surprise me.
It was early evening and
reporters would be looking
for facts to flex out their story.
But surely the next morning
would have been a firestorm of meetings
at Ford headquarters, or maybe not.
- I don't remember anything untoward,
I mean, typically on a typical day,
my office was two doors down
from the chairman's office.
I would usually go in, in the morning
and brief him on anything
I knew that was going on
in the world that might
affect our business.
So I'm sure I briefed him,
but I don't remember anything specifically
that anybody was upset about anything
or deeply concerned,
it really had nothing to do
with us other than the fact
that Cowlings happened to
be driving his white Bronco.
(gentle music)
- Wow, I don't remember anything untoward,
this is the highest ranking
PR person in the company.
The guy whose job is to alert the chairman
about world events,
and he describes it just like another day
and the highway chase
happened on the Friday,
so this meeting didn't even
take place until Monday,
three days after this all went down.
So what about Bailey's
claim that sales went up?
David Scott has an answer for that too.
- I think one of the curiosities,
one of the happenstances was
it's so happened that in that
time period, which was June,
the Western region
sales office had ordered
a bunch of extra white
Broncos as a promotion,
nothing to do with OJ at all,
just as a promotion of Broncos.
(gentle upbeat music)
- Yeah, it had nothing to
do with the chase at all.
It was just that white vehicles
always sell better in the
summer, especially California.
So dealers had planned a big sales event.
- And those things started
arriving about a week
after the incident, and
was sold out immediately,
and people accused us of
taking advantage of it,
but we didn't, it was an
order that had happened
maybe three months before
and just by coincidence,
several hundred of these vehicles
arrived during that period
after the OJ incident.
- Now, if you take David Scott at his word
and he's retired now
and has no reason to
give me corporate spin,
the events of June 17th, 1994
had nothing to do with it.
It was just all business.
(gentle music)
In the weeks that followed,
stories about the chase
and the coming trial field the airways,
it was millions and millions
of brand references.
For many, it turned the Bronco
into a notorious vehicle.
Which leaves us with a big question,
did the chase of the
century kill the Bronco?
- You know, I hate to use
the word, kill it by the way,
we discontinued the name and
substituted the Expedition
as the product for the Bronco.
- Yes, but why?
- Well, you coming from
it, if I might be so bold
to say a little from the wrong side,
which is, it wasn't a
decision to kill the Bronco,
it was a decision to
launch the Expedition.
(bright upbeat music)
- One last piece of
business I need to tie up,
whatever happened to the
white Bronco from the chase.
Well, Al Cowlings is the
owner sold it to his agent
for 75 grand, the agent
then put it in a garage
and locked the door.
Over the years, a few
people have tried to buy it,
but he has always said no.
One day he got an offer
from a tour company
that takes people to
where celebrities died.
They wanted to use the white Bronco
and drive tourists to
where Nicole Brown Simpson
and Ron Goldman were killed.
The agent turned that down as well.
I've even found a guy in Hollywood
who is renting a white
Bronco for bachelor parties,
so you could take one last
drive with your best bros,
but that wasn't the real Bronco.
The real Bronco is here.
- Our museum is dedicated
to crime consequences
throughout the ages,
all the way from medieval
to colonial pirates,
Wild West serial killers, all
the way through prohibition,
up to modern day pop culture crimes.
- That's Candice cook,
and this is the Alcatraz
East Crime Museum,
in of all places Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
- I would say John Wayne Gaycy
clown suits are very popular.
Anything that we have on
serial killers and forensics,
Ted Bundy's car is definitely the one
that'll give you the creeps the most.
He was famous for liking the Volkswagen
because he could remove the passenger seat
and put his victims in it.
So it is still removed,
passenger door open,
definitely get a vibe
when you come down here.
- And sitting just a few feet
away from that creepy car
is the white Bronco.
Yes, that white Bronco.
- I'd say when people see it,
they're not expecting it
when they come downstairs
and they just see it, they're just amazed,
and then they are in disbelief
that it's the real Bronco
vehicle, and it really is.
We have the video playing,
the Bronco signage that
says, yes, it is real,
it really is the one from the chase
and somehow it ended up
here in East Tennessee.
I think it's just one of those
iconic pieces of history.
Everybody remembers turning on the TV,
watching with millions of people
that two hour long slow car
chase on the interstate.
And so when they see it here in person,
it's just amazing to see.
(gentle upbeat music)
- That's specific Bronco is off the road
because of the chase.
But when it comes to the entire
brand, it is safe to say,
and I'm well aware of the irony,
the famous football player and
actor is not a real killer.
So what did kill the Bronco?
(gentle music)
(energetic music)
I need to go back in time a little bit.
The police chase was 1994,
but for the next suspect,
we have to return to 1991,
when the Bronco II was shelved.
Ford's its replacement for it
was a smaller fuel efficient
SUV called the Explorer.
Its first year sales were promising
and the future looks bright.
(energetic music)
Now I'm sure you've heard of baby boomers.
Oh, I know you've know
you've heard of them
because they won't stop
talking about themselves.
The folks born after World War II,
they were the biggest
population spike ever.
Well, what do you think
the boomers were doing
in the late 80s and early 90s?
Answer, making babies.
The demographic phenomenon
is called an echo boom.
(gentle music)
Those young families were demanding
something different from their vehicles.
Station wagons were out of fashion
and minivans hadn't
yet reached their peak.
The Explorer was built to fill that gap
and it had one key
difference with the Bronco,
the number of doors.
You see the Bronco through
all of its evolutions
and redesigns was always
a two-door vehicle,
the Explorer had four.
Parents were getting tired of
getting out of their truck,
lifting up the little lever
and laying their seat forward
so their kids could scramble
out of the backseat,
I can hear the arguments now.
So they built a bigger
version of the Explorer
to replace the Bronco.
And if you're looking for someone to blame
for the two-door Bronco being
replaced in the product line
with a four-door SUV,
you can blame those kids in the back seat,
those echo boomers.
Funny thing, that term echo
boomer never really stuck,
you probably know them as millennials.
(energetic music)
So yeah, blame the
millennials, why not? Right?
They get blamed for everything else.
And that was it, after 30 years.
- Blazing a new trail of excitement.
- Six generations of redesigns.
- See the Ford Bronco II.
- After 1,148,926 Broncos
rolled off the line.
- You're ahead in a Ford all the way.
- It was over.
- When we heard it was being discontinued,
I was sad because the Bronco
name plate was going away.
- That's Todd Zuercher, he
wrote the book on Bronco.
- You know, the thing had been
in production for 30 years
and I was like, man,
you know it's really sad
that that's going away.
- Todd was sad, but he was also puzzled,
to him, there was a very simple solution
that Ford was ignoring.
- I think they could have
just renamed it a Bronco,
their four-door successor,
I think they could have just
kept the Bronco name going
and applied it to a
new family of vehicles.
(gentle piano music)
- Todd's idea rattled around
in my head for a few days,
the more I thought about
it, the more it made sense.
I mean, I get that the
truck had to be changed,
but couldn't they do a redesign
and still continue the name.
Think about it, in 1978,
they essentially released
an entirely new truck,
but kept the Bronco name,
and it was a huge success.
Why not just build a four-door Bronco?
Well, I took that question to David Scott.
- The brand people decided that
they wanted to go with a new name to show
that there was a completely new vehicle,
more related to the Explorer
than to the old Bronco.
- It was David's job to
erase the Bronco's name,
of course he didn't frame it that way.
- My group had to establish
the Expedition as a name.
- Expedition, that's the name they chose
for their new four-door Bronco sized SUV.
- Management was trying to
reimagine Ford Motor Company.
In 96, we were three years
into a total reconstitution
of Ford as a global company,
and it changed the way
the company operated.
And so I think the
management was looking at
what are the new things we can do
rather than rely on the
old things that we've done.
You can argue whether that's
a good decision or not,
but that was the process of the decision.
(bright music)
- David left one detail
out in his explanation
of why the name was changed.
It's so obvious, maybe he felt
he didn't need to mention it,
but consider the names of the SUV
for debuted between 1991 and 2000,
Explorer, Expedition, Excursion, Escape.
Okay, it horrifies me that
it could be that simple,
that the name Bronco with all the heritage
and brand value that
it carried was dropped
because it didn't start with the letter E.
Sometimes the answer
to the most complex
question is, alliteration.
It wasn't a single thing that
led to the end of the Bronco,
but it wasn't a death by
a thousand cuts either.
It was a series of full force body blows
coming from all sides that
brought it down, Todd Zuercher.
- I think what killed it really was,
it was kind of a dinosaur,
it was sort of an
anachronism by that point,
the full sized Blazer
had been killed five or six years earlier,
the Plymouth Trailduster
and Dodge Ramcharger
no longer existed.
So, it was really sort of
a market entity of one,
and really the small SUV is
the Ford Explorers killed it.
It was taken out by a member
of its own family, if you will.
The Bronco did have a real
storied place in Ford's lineup,
but I think it gave motivation
to those of us who were
still Bronco people
who were Bronco enthusiasts,
we were in Bronco clubs.
It gave us a stronger
determination to enjoy our trucks,
keep them going,
even if the name plate
didn't exist anymore,
that we were going to keep
the dream alive so to speak.
- Terminating a product line takes years,
almost as long as launching a new one.
I found planning documents in the archives
dating back to 1993, that
analyzed life after Bronco.
Officially, however, Bronco's
death was June 12th, 1996.
(gentle music)
- Ford marks another milestone
in production yesterday
at the Michigan Truck Plant,
as the last of a long
running series of trucks
rolled off the assembly line.
- For the occasion of the
last Bronco being produced,
Ford staged the little parade.
- A vintage 1974 Bronco
was the lead vehicle
that Michigan Truck celebrated.
- That little red Bronco
belonged to none other
than Jeff Trapp.
(car engine cranking)
He's the guy that
founded Bronco Graveyard.
- I was privileged to being invited down
to the Michigan Truck Plant.
So I took my vintage
1970 Bronco down there,
and we put it back on the assembly line
and rolled it back down
the assembling line,
and there was the last iconic Bronco,
1996 was a white Bronco, like the OJ one,
then the first Expedition came after that.
- It felt like a weight, part
funeral, part celebration.
- It's not the end of the era,
it's the beginning of another.
(gentle upbeat music)
- The Bronco really was
like an ugly stepchild
to them for a long time.
They went to the Expedition
and then you had the Lincoln Navigator,
which was a luxury vehicle.
- Those cars did the job,
but neither really did
what the Bronco did.
- People wanted an off road vehicle,
like take hunting,
fishing, going four wheel.
And I just kept my hopes up,
I go, well, I got a family to feed,
I got four or five workers here
that need depend on me for a living,
we get got to keep the Bronco going,
we keep selling parts for them
and hopefully one day Ford will look back
and say, hey, we need the Bronco again.
(gentle music)
One other important
thing happened that year.
You see, 1996 is not just the year
Ford built their last Bronco,
it's also the year they left Detroit.
In December Ford
announced they were moving
all 2,500 employees at
their downtown offices
out to Dearborn, out to the suburbs,
it was the end of an era and so many ways.
(gentle music)
(bright upbeat music)
- That brings us to the
halfway point of the series.
We've covered the rise and
fall of the Ford Bronco.
Now it's time for the rebirth,
which it turns out was actually
the bumpiest road of all.
As the calendar turns from
the 1990s to the 2000s,
two things happen, around the
country Bronco nation grows,
solidifies, and even organizes,
and inside for an underground forms,
a group of Ford employees
that secretly plot
to bring back Bronco, that's next time.
Chapter 5, Driving in the
Dark, I'm Sonari Glinton.
Be sure to subscribe to Bring
Back Bronco on Apple Podcasts,
Spotify, Google Podcasts,
or wherever you listen.
(gentle upbeat music)
- OJ Simpson is depicted
as a part of a news event.
He did not participate in this podcast
and does not endorse
or have any affiliation
with Ford or this podcast.
