Opel Olympia. Ford of Germany had no experience of this construction method, having spent most of the 1940s concentrating on building light trucks. Project 1's predecessor, the Ford Taunus designed in the 1930s, had had its body built by Ambi Budd, an independent specialist pressed steel body builder in Berlin until 1948, and after the Berlin firm had its surviving plant crated up and shipped to the Soviet Union, Ford had in 1948 been driven to having Ford Taunus bodies produced by competitors and specialists from northern Germany, Volkswagen and Karmann. Ford's Cologne management sought cooperation from other German auto-makers with developing the processes necessary for producing the monocoque Project 1 model, but the other German auto-makers had priorities of their own, and in the end it was with support from Ford of France that the production lines for German Ford's project 1 were set up at the company's Cologne plant. In due course, and not before a certain amount of confusion concerning the naming of the car, Ford's Project 1 was released to the market as the Ford Taunus 12M. It proved a success. By the time the half globe was removed from the car's nose, 247,174 of the 12M version had been sold along with 127,942 of the subsequently introduced Ford Taunus 15Ms. The name The naming of the car is another area which may have been complicated by the way that responsibilities were shared between different management teams in two continents divided by an eight-hour time difference and the Atlantic Ocean. The immediate postwar era was seen as a new beginning for a newly divided Germany with, in the west, new borders, a new constitution and a new political class. The monocoque bodied new model for 1952 also represented a new beginning for Ford, so identifying it as Ford of Germany's Project 1 (P1) was evidently uncontentious. Ford Taunus 12M/15M production (units): 1952 30,650 1953 35,888 1954 42,631 1955 58,456 1956 64,872 1957 50,734 1958 29,688 1959 52,648 1960 94,408 1961 61,474 1962 34,014 Totals ( saloons/sedans & estates/kombis): 1952-1959 Taunus 12M 1.2L: 215,265 1954-1958 Taunus 15M 1.5L: 134,127 1959-1962 Taunus 12M 1.2L: 126,581 1959-1962 Taunus 12M 1.5L: 69,191 Not included in these totals are the saloons/sedans converted into two seater cabriolets by the Cologne based coach builder Karl Deutsch. In the 1930s Ford of Germany had, along with Opel, pioneered the use of model names that