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It dates back to 2005 when I tried to figure out how these were named: http://imcdb.org/vehicle_15328-Ford-V8-De-Luxe-01A-1940.html
Well that conversation doesn’t make a lick of sense. Right off the bat you can’t identify weather the car in question is a three passenger Coupe or five passenger Business Coupe; in turn the chassis code is unidentifiable. On top of that Ford offered two different sized V8s from 37-40, and by labeling all cars by V8 we make no attempt to distinguish.
After going through Ford ads and brouchures from that period I found that this was how Ford named them, almost without exception between 1932-40, after that the designation V-8 dissappeared.
So what? Brochures are written by sales people; they make shit up all time to sell car. Have you ever read the Somewhere West of Laramie ad? It barely mentions a car. G-Mann and I went back and forth on de Ville vs. deVille vs. DeVille for a few weeks mostly because the stupid admen would spell it multiple ways on the same page.
That´s the reason we have this field at all, before long we began to put codes for other cars as well, like the Fords. In some cases codes for bodies ended up here too. This was not the intention of course, and now we would need a field for these codes also. Hopefully this will be added in the coming upgraded version of the site.
I think a code for the engine would make a lot more sense. For me the primary source of information is the manufacturers own published material
Absolutely, but keep in mind the sales brochure is only tangentially the manufacturers. It is written by an outside company, and given how the Ford Motor Company was run in the 30s (poor Edsel) I kind of doubt it received a great deal of review before printing. Model 18 and later codes are put in chassisfield, Ford kept the same system until at least 1951, 1HA and 1BA was the codes for sixes and eights respectively. It´s the same type of code and that´s why they ended up in that field.
Well, by that theory all Fords made before 1930 should be nameless with the chassis field distinguishing.
Actually that might be something to think about; we kind of force model names on a lot of the earlier cars that really didn’t have any. For example the LaSalle really shouldn’t have any model names; they only made one car a year and the variation was whatever type of body was mounted to the same chassis.