Mimi Vandermolen joined Ford Motor Company in 1970, working in the Industrial Design department on Philco products and later that year was moved to the Lincoln interiors studio. In 1972, she started working in the Mustang II studio first in exteriors and then interiors. She was named a senior designer in 1974 and moved to large car exteriors before being laid off because of the poor economy. She worked for Autodynamics for three years before moving to Chrysler in their truck studio in 1977. She returned to Ford Motor Company in 1977, working in interiors and was sent to Ghia for a brief period in 1978. On her return to the US in 1979 she was promoted to design specialist working on large and small cars. In 1981, she moved to the advanced studio and soon after was named manager of interiors for the Taurus/Sable program. At the time of the interview, she was working on luxury car derivatives of the Taurus/Sable. In 1987, she was appointed design executive for small car interiors. She later went on to work for Ford in Japan on the 2nd generation Probe, and in 1993 joined General Motors as Marketing Director for Cadillac and later Buick. In her oral history, Vandermolen discusses her early love of cars and education at the Ontario College of Art focusing on Industrial Design. She talks about her early time at Ford under John Najaar and taking night classes in automotive design at the Center of Creative Studies under Homer LaGassey. She talks about the atmosphere at Ford for a woman designer and how the only other women were secretaries and were not welcoming to her, but that she received quite a bit of support from her fellow male designers. She discusses her early career as a trainee working on sketching, rendering, and modeling and some of the basic design procedures at Ford in the early 1970s. She discusses that while she got support from her male colleagues, sometimes she felt she needed to prove herself as a woman in the field before being accepted. She discusses her time working in the LTD studio and also working on the Thunderbird and the power of the feasibility studies to completely change the design of vehicles. She discusses her time on the Taurus/Sable program at length, managing the interior team, the focus on design from the bottom up in this particular program, as well as the difficulties she and her team went through to sell fairly new looks to management. She wraps up discussing her concerns for Ford in the future, their return to a more conservative type of design and the economic cutbacks they were making which she thought would have a negative impact on creativity in the future. She also discusses her work on ergonomics on the Taurus, particularly lumbar support and instrument panel layout.

Collection contains 3 cassettes, 1 diskette, 1 loose transcript, 1 bound transcript, 1 Word transcript, and 1 PDF transcript. Updated February 20,2026.