Ford Motor Credit Company option certificate - 1987 Germany

Ford Motor Credit Company LLC, dba Ford Credit, is the financial services arm of Ford Motor Company, and is headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan.

Its business activities are concentrated primarily in the area of automobile loans in support of its parent company. The company offers consumer loans and leases to car buyers, as well as business loans and lines of credit to dealerships selling Ford Motor Company products. The firm also issues commercial paper and other debt instruments on Ford's behalf.  Ford Credit also owns Lincoln Automotive Financial Services, the arm that finances Lincoln vehicles.

Since the automotive industry crisis of 2008, Ford Credit has been the only financial arm of Detroit's "Big Three" still owned by its parent automaker due to the spinoff of GMAC (now Ally Financial) by General Motors and the purchase of Chrysler Financial (now TD Auto Finance) by Toronto-Dominion Bank.

Classic vignette of the Ford Blue Oval logo at the top.  Elaborate underprint on this uncommon German certificate fro Ford Credit.

Henry Ford's first attempt at a car company under his own name was the Henry Ford Company on November 3, 1901, which became the Cadillac Motor Company on August 22, 1902, after Ford left with the rights to his name. The Ford Motor Company was launched in a converted factory in 1903 with $28,000 in cash from twelve investors, most notably John and Horace Dodge (who would later found their own car company).

During its early years, the company produced just a few cars a day at its factory on Mack Avenue in Detroit, Michigan. Groups of two or three men worked on each car, assembling it from parts made mostly by supplier companies contracting for Ford. Within a decade the company would lead the world in the expansion and refinement of the assembly line concept; and Ford soon brought much of the part production in-house in a vertical integration that seemed a better path for the era. Ford introduced the first moving assembly line in 1913.

Henry Ford was 39 years old when he founded the Ford Motor Company, which would go on to become one of the world's largest and most profitable companies, as well as being one to survive the Great Depression. As one of the largest family-controlled companies in the world, the Ford Motor Company