In fact, Ford became famous for saying his customers could have the US$825 Model T in any color — so long as it was black.

In the century since the first Model T in 1908, Ford’s vision of top-down efficiency has been swamped by thousands of feature and color combinations on new cars, trucks and SUVs.

The result, executives say, has been higher production and inventory costs and headaches for customers and dealers in sorting through a complex matrix of choices.

Now, Ford Motor Co. and other embattled U.S. automakers are going back to black, embracing the spirit of Ford’s notion in response to mounting losses and the risk of a deeper downturn in the United States, the world’s largest market for new cars, in 2008.

Ford Chief Executive Alan Mulally said he was amazed by the number of variations Ford offered when he arrived at the No. 2 U.S. automaker from Boeing Co. in 2006.

“I was looking at the (Lincoln) Navigator console,” Mulally said. “We have 128 different options you could choose on the console. That’s just the console.”

With so many variations, a customer inevitably will want a vehicle that is not in stock, leading to a frustrated customer and pressure on the dealer to offer a discount, Mulally said.

“They’re unhappy and we’re losing money,” he said of Ford, which posted losses of US$2.7 billion in 2007 and US$12.6 billion in 2006.

Ford’s chief of marketing, Jim Farley, who was hired away from Toyota Motor Co. last year, said he was stunned to find that Ford was offering 100,000 combinations of options on its entry-level Focus sedan. Some 80 percent of Ford’s sales came from just 4,000 of those combinations, he said.

In response, Ford has cut complexity by reducing the number of “buildable combinations” of the 2008 Focus by 99 percent. On the 2008 Expedition, it has cut combinations by 95 percent.

“Coming from Toyota, I can tell you that the opportunity is there to reduce the complexity of our line-up,” Farley told analysts recently.

It’s a similar story at Chrysler LLC, where sales chief Jim Press — another high-level defection from Toyota — has also pushed the struggling automaker to simplify.

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