Never Stop Driving #95: Long Live the Mustang

It's Mustang Week here at Hagerty Media HQ! Sixty years ago, on April 17, 1964, the Mustang made its public debut at the New York World's Fair. We're celebrating with reams of new material that you can follow here.

The Mustang's six-decade run-and counting-is extraordinary in an industry that's littered with failures. While the Mustang soldiered on, many cars and car companies failed in the U.S. market. Consider this: Peugeot, Saturn, Ford's own Mercury, Pontiac, MG, and even the 'Stang's closest competitor, the Camaro. What's the secret sauce?

Anyone who says they know is full of it. I'll take a stab anyway and suggest that Ford got many things right at the start and didn't fumble its first-mover advantage. The key elements were the cost and design. Lee Iacocca's boss, Henry Ford II-The Deuce, was skeptical of new car lines after the failure of the Edsel. Therefore, Iacocca knew the right design was make or break to convince the Ford scion to greenlight the project. A simple sketch penned by designer Gale Halderman that outlined the Mustang's basic shape proved critical.

As we explained in this article that documented Halderman's drawing, Iacocca often credited product planners Don Frey and Hal Sperlich for their key Mustang roles. The car's debut was a PR masterstroke, ginning up demand for six-cylinder Mustangs that retailed for just $2400. Ford sold some 22,000 Mustangs on the first day and nearly half a million in the initial 12 months of production, a boon for a company that sold 1.5 million cars in 1964. The U.S. car market was roughly half the size of today's, with about eight million in total sales. I imagine that 60 years ago this week, they popped many champagne corks at Ford Motor Company HQ in Dearborn.

Race-winning models developed by Carroll Shelby solidified the Mustang's performance credibility even though it was based on the humble Falcon. The industry knew what Ford had done and rushed to respond, as we detailed in this article. By the time the competition arrived there were around a million Mustangs in the wild, ensuring a nearly endless supply of cheap used Mustangs to further imprint on the nation's youth.

That imprinting ensured the car's survival even when Ford tried to kill it. One of my favorite Mustang stories is from the late 1980s, when Ford thought it needed to replace its aging V-8 muscle car with a four-cylinder front-wheel-drive model called the Probe. Egad! Lucky for us, a group of rabid Ford engineers headed by John Coletti saw the folly in this plan and worked after-hours to keep the Mustang alive. You can read the full story here.

I've owned three Mustangs: one each from the Sixties,the Eighties, and the Nineties. The most recent one sold on the Hagerty Marketplace auction site. I'm on the prowl for another, either a 2012 Boss 302 or the so-called sixth generation known as the S550. I have my eye on this 50^th anniversary currently up for bidding but I fear it'll get out of my price range. The hunt will continue.

While the Camaro recently ended production, the Mustang is thriving. Ford recently introduced the new Dark Horse edition, which Jason Cammisa reviewed in this video. There's also a ladder of racing models built and sold by Ford. Amazing. Later this year, the wildest street Mustang ever imagined, the Mustang GTD, will go on sale for about $300,000. Order books are now open. Who would have guessed 60 years ago that there would one day be a Mustang priced like a Ferrari?

Happy birthday, Mustang!

Larry

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