In the early 1960s Argentine president Arturo Frondizi pushed through a set of far-reaching economic reforms that quickly established a branch-plant automotive sector in that country. Car manufacturing and oil exploitation were the cornerstones of Frondizi’s ambitious ‘developmentalist’ program for Argentina, and both depended upon partnerships with (mainly American) multinational corporations. While other scholars have examined the economic effects of Frondizi’s policies, this paper focuses on the cultural and political values that underpined them. It draws inspiration from the best recent cultural analyses of automobility to explore the claims about technological modernity, speed, and progress that were projected onto the new automotive sector, focusing on the example of Ford Motors and its decision to manufacture its new Ford Falcon sedan in Argentina. The Falcon design, spearheaded by Robert McNamara during his career as a Ford executive, embodied the high modernist ideals of this moment: the belief in the power of technocratic expertise to ‘speed up’ history and rapidly transform societies. The paper will demonstrate why the partnership with Ford was so important to Frondizi, and how the Falcon manufacturing project was cast as a grand experiment to transplant American-style Fordism to Argentina.