Even if the advertising material was produced by an outside company, it was done in the name of the manufacturer, often in cooperation with their marketing and sales organization.
I guess you're not very familiar with how the Ford Motor Company was run during its days as a private enterprise.
We can have a lot of opinions on how this material was written, some of it is really bad and confusing, but mostly we can easily see how the cars were referred to. We can also debate what’s a modelname and what’s not, but if we delete everything that’s not a unique name there won’t be much to enter on cars built before about 1950, and in many cases several years after that.
No, I disagree, there's plenty to differentiate between the varieties of models. Simply because the official in-company designations are a little esoteric compared to the colloquial phases the public used is no reason not to classify by them. Especially as there can never be a right answer when using outside terms.
This way of naming cars, before dedicated modelnames appeared, only by bodystyle, engine or trimlevel was very common through decades. Entering that info in the model field just reflects a common practise of that era.
I strongly disagree. The site is a database, it needs to be consistent and using these arbitrary phrases only leads to a multitude of different names for the same car; which we now have in abundance for many of the early models.
You see it as forcing names on the cars, I can understand that, but if we delete this type of information there’s nothing left after entering the Make of the car.
We have the chassis code, the body style, the engine, etc. And hopefully someday the site will have different fields in which to enter these designations. Until then putting that stuff in the model name field only leads to confusion. Isn't having too little information better then false info?
On this site we deal with almost every type of vehicle that moves on land, to enter all information absolutely correct in every detail regarding them is virtually impossible. It covers vehicles produced all over the globe, during more than a century.
We make a lot of effort to find correct designations for them when they’re sold on different export markets, it’s not uncommon that at least the modelname is changed, and sometimes also the make.
The natural source for this information is of course advertising material, with its pros and cons. We could of course reject this information and only use the designations used on homemarket, or the set of codes that might be connected to the vehicle. But I don’t think it would improve the site really.
I never proposed rejecting anything. I merely think the site should be cognitive that a lot of the hyperbole of the sales brochures is designed to separate a fool from his money; not a wholly accurate technical manual.
And allowing the cars of the early era to be described as they were when new is no different to me than to find out how names have changed from market to market.
Usually when the name is changed for a different market without any real difference between models it's the result of translation issues or words/phrases that mean different things in different cultures. Not just some marketing ploy.
To make the site searchable and consistent we need to use these commercial designations as they were,
But that is the very reason so much of the pre-WWII vehicles aren't searchable and consistent. We have a multitude of names for the exact same car because people are using the colloquial marketing phrases as the model name, in some cases such phrases differ from year to year, owner to owner, and brochure to brochure.
and also add the codes. Both sides carry vital information. One problem is that the given material can be inconsistent and contradictory, but we can deal with that and come to a decision on how to enter it. We also have only one field for codes, intended for chassis, this field contains several types of codes today (Engine, body, platform etc.) depending on what codes are available from different makers. This can also be improved.
You're getting way off topic here. My question was; why has the site arbitrarily decided to name 32-40 Fords with a V8 in their model names. The marketing people made the V8 prominent in the sales literature because the next cheapest car with a V8 cost five times as much; it was never a model name.