[Auto] The man who made Fords great to drive has passed away.

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Richard Parry-Jones, the engineer responsible more than any other for the driving excellence of 21st-century Fords, has died aged 69.

The news has sent shockwaves round an industry where his influence had spread hugely. And where he wasn’t only admired but held in deep affection by everyone who knew him. He was killed in an accident on the farm in Wales where he’d retired.

Parry-Jones was a brilliant dynamics engineer, a superb communicator, a motorsports fan and an early advocate for the need for the car industry to reduce CO2. His working life is a demonstration of how one individual really can have an influence over this whole colossal industry.

The man known to all as RP-J was a Ford lifer, having joined as an apprentice. His first big hit was as chief engineer of the Mondeo, launched in 1992. This was a huge programme: Ford spent about £5bn (in 1995 money) on the Mondeo and its American equivalents the Ford Contour and Mercury Mystique.

Previous to that car, Ford’s engineering effort – and it was very well executed - was all about saving money. If in consequence the car’s ride was lumpy and the engine rough and the steering slack, well that was tough luck: they were profitable cars to manufacture and sell.

With the Mondeo, Parry-Jones shifted Ford’s course. He reckoned there would be more money to be made by building better cars that would sell in higher numbers at higher prices. He sweated every detail of the engineering in search of improvements in dynamics and refinement.

You’d be driving with him and he’d say things like, ‘see, we’ve changed the compliance in the steering rack bushes. The customer can feel it you know’. He was passionate, and a brilliant communicator.

It’s a rather awful irony that within weeks of Ford’s announcement that the Mondeo will be no more, we also lose the man that made it.

After that Mondeo, he led on the Fiesta, a vast improvement on what went before, and the lovely Puma coupe. Then the 1998 Focus, a radically designed and brilliant-driving hatch, night and day better than the Escort. All spawned wonderful hot versions too.

At that point he was promoted to Detroit to head all Ford’s engineering and design worldwide. He admitted to being pretty shocked at some of the US metal he had to deal with. Even the dominant F-150 pickup.

He was also in charge of engineering for all the vehicles under the FoMoCo umbrella, including, at the time, Jaguar Land Rover, Volvo, Mazda, Lincoln and Aston Martin. He returned to the board of Aston recently.