The American automobile giants The Ford Motor Company, known nowadays simply as Ford, was founded over 100 years ago in 1903 by Henry Ford and is has grown to become the 5th largest automobile manufacturer in the world where sales figures are concerned.

Henry Ford not only is responsible for creating a company which has gone on to achieve revenues as high as £80 billion in 2012, he was also at the heart of revolutionising how cars were produced. For it was Ford who pioneered the assembly line method for producing cars. It is believed that Ford got the idea from the method in which pigs are butchered for meat, and the idea is still the most common way that automobiles are manufactured today.

Ford's most famous race car is undoubtedly the GT40, known to be one of Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson's favourite racing cars. And that's not surprising, considering the classic car won the Le Mans 24 hour race 4 times in a row during the 1960's, and is named so because the car is just 40 inches high off the ground.