The Ford family is paying a heavy price to maintain its controlling stake in the automaker. In less than seven months, the family has lost $533 million on the special shares that give it 40 percent of the voting rights in the company.

Its holdings in those shares are now worth about $89 million, down from more than $2.5 billion less than a decade ago.

Through a combination of trusts, the founding family owns 70.85 million Class B shares, but if it were to sell off a modest number of that stake, its voting rights would drop to 30 percent under rules established when the company went public in 1956.

Some Ford family members have taken additional financial hits through their holdings of ordinary common stock. According to the most recent disclosures posted by Bloomberg data services, William Clay Ford Jr. holds 5.2 million shares and Edsel B. Ford II owns 2.7 million shares. Their common stock holdings have lost $39 million and $20.3 million in value respectively since May.

William Ford sold about 1 million shares on Sept. 18 for $5 a share, four times what the stock closed at Wednesday.

The financial setbacks for the Ford family contrast with the relative financial savvy the company showed two years ago. When Ford Motor mortgaged virtually the entire company - down to its blue oval trademark - to raise $23 billion in late 2006, many analysts took it as a sign of weakness. General Motors, by contrast, decided at that time that it had enough cash to see its way through a changing automobile market.

Two years later, that could make the difference between life and death for America's two biggest automakers. Ford Motor, while ailing, is not as desperate as GM for a government cash infusion. It says that it can survive 2009 and hope that better times, new products and better labor terms will kick in in 2010. GM said its cash could run out early next year without federal help.s