Ben Cohen, writing last week for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
One rainy day 40 years ago, Moylan was headed to a meeting across
Ford’s campus and hopped in a company car. When he saw the fuel
tank was nearly empty, he stopped at a gas pump. What happened
next is something that’s happened to all of us: He realized that
he’d parked on the wrong side.Unlike the rest of us, he wasn’t infuriated. He was inspired. By
the time he pulled his car around, he was already thinking about
how to solve this everyday inconvenience that drives people
absolutely crazy. And because the gas pump wasn’t covered by an
overhead awning, he was also soaking wet. But when he got back to
the office, Moylan didn’t even bother taking off his drenched coat
when he started typing the first draft of a memo.“I would like to propose a small addition,” he wrote, “in all
passenger car and truck lines.” The proposal he had in mind was a
symbol on the dashboard that would tell drivers which side of the
car the gas tank was on. […]As soon as they read his memo, they began prototyping his little
indicator that would be known as the Moylan Arrow. Within months,
it was on the dashboard of Ford’s upcoming models. Within years,
it was ripped off by the competition. Before long, it was a
fixture of just about every car in the world.
What a fantastic story. I’m old enough that I remember learning to drive on cars that didn’t have the Moylan Arrow. Then I remember spotting one sometime in the 1990s, and wondering if I’d just never noticed them before. But no: this seemingly incredibly obvious design element had only recently been invented. The Journal has a copy of Moylan’s original memo, and it’s a delight to read. Clear, concise, persuasive.
“Society loves the founder who builds new companies, like Henry
Ford,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told me. “I would argue that Jim Moylan
is an equally compelling kind of disrupter: an engineer in a large
company who insisted on making our daily lives better.”These days, there are two types of drivers: the ones aware of the
Moylan Arrow and the ones who get to find out.
Rest in peace, Jim Moylan.
