Philco also made home appliances too. At the time other US car makers had consumer appliance divisions, GM had Fridgidaire, American Motors had Kelvinator, and Chrysler had Airtemp. Each of them contributed a lot of profit to their parent companies in the post-war consumer boom years. Ford always felt like they were missing out. Also, in the 50's Ford management believed the only way for them to beat GM was to be more like GM. So they went shopping and bought several companies in the late 50's and early 60's. Philco, Ford thought, had the added benefit of making electronics and could also save them money by making car radios. Philco also had a huge NASA contract they were just starting on and Ford already had an aerospace division.

Another funny thing that may be true is that Henry Ford II loved alliteration. That's why so many Ford cars of the time had names starting with "F" such as Falcon, Fairlane, Futura, etc. Supposedly, he liked Philco because the "Ph" sounds like "F" in english and he liked the sound of Philco-Ford.

I've read that Philco never made a profit for Ford the whole time they owned it. Ford tried pumping loads of money into advertising and product development and nothing worked. They had huge quality issues too.

The final straw came when Philco had gotten a batch of bad components from Motorola that were assembled at Philco's Brazil plant into circuit boards, that were then shipped to the US for final assembly. Apparently nobody along the chain bothered to test things and about three months worth of Philco TV production had to be brought back into the factories to correct the problems. It was so costly that Ford management decided to sell Philco at a loss if necessary. They sold the rights to the Philco name and the Taiwan plant to GTE, and the US plants to Zenith.