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    Mustang and the Pony Car Revolution
    Mustang and the Pony Car Revolution
    Mustang and the Pony Car Revolution
    Ebook167 pages53 minutes

    Mustang and the Pony Car Revolution

    By Michael W. R. Davis

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    About this ebook

    There have been few cars that ignited the public's interest as much as the Ford Mustang.


    Introduced at the opening of the New York World's Fair in April 1964, the Mustang was based on mechanicals from the earlier Ford Falcon compact car; it quickly established a new motorcar category which was widely copied by domestic and overseas competitors--the "pony car." From the outset, the Mustang represented inspired product planning and design, followed by brilliantly executed marketing. Ford's Mustang team effort used every tool in the vehicle-marketing toolbox: clever teases long before the new product went on sale, unprecedented publicity, simple but effective advertising, the stage at the World's Fair, movie placement, distribution of toy plastic models, and even a replica pedal car for the young drivers of the future. With a measure of luck, it became a classic case of releasing the right product at the right time, and Ford sold one million units in less than two years. Even today, the Mustang is held high as a symbol of American design, engineering, and the freewheeling American spirit.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateApr 7, 2014
    ISBN9781439642627
    Mustang and the Pony Car Revolution
    Author

    Michael W. R. Davis

    Author Michael W.R. Davis is a veteran automotive journalist and historian, as well as an author of six previous Arcadia photographic histories. Though he is a Chevrolet historian, Davis spent 25 years with Ford Motor Company before returning to journalism, authoring and serving as the executive director of the Detroit Historical Society for five years. In addition to holding degrees from Yale and Eastern Michigan Universities, Davis is a member of the Society of Automotive Historians and a trustee of the National Automotive History Collection at the Detroit Public Library, a main source of many of the images in this book.

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      Book preview

      Mustang and the Pony Car Revolution - Michael W. R. Davis

      volume.

      INTRODUCTION

      In my 25 years with Ford Motor Company Public Relations, I was never a member, specifically, of the Ford Division’s PR office, though twice I was loaned to the division on special assignments. The first time, my assignment was to prepare press materials for Ford’s 1961 truck lines; the second, to prepare all of the US materials for a subcompact Ford of Germany car to be imported for the 1963 model year, internally code-named Cardinal by Ford. This vehicle was to be assembled in Cologne for the European market and in Louisville for the American market.

      I had been working diligently for several weeks, preparing the full range of media information on Cardinal and coordinating two simultaneous media previews, scheduled for June 1962, in Germany and in Kentucky. Then, late one afternoon, Walt Murphy, the Ford Division PR chief, came into my borrowed office, lit up his omnipresent pipe when I swiveled to face him, and explained that he had just returned from a round of visiting dealers in Texas with Lee Iacocca, the head of Ford Division. I leaned forward in my chair to receive the gossipy report that made working for Walt so much fun.

      Iacocca’s killing the Cardinal, he remarked. All I could blurt out in response was, No s***? Yeah, he continued. He says ‘it’s a little old ladies’ car, gray on the inside and gray on the outside. We need something with pizzazz to counter Monza.’ Monza was Chevrolet’s sporty coupe version of the rear-engine Corvair compact sedan, introduced a couple of years before.

      For me, that was the end of Cardinal—almost—and the beginning of Mustang. It turned out that a team of product planners, engineers, stylists, and marketers had been working on a new car concept that, in April 1964, a mere two years later, became the reality of Mustang. This was the start of the pony car revolution. The internal code name for the Mustang, by the way, was Special Falcon, perhaps because the new sporty coupe was based largely on Falcon components. But I had no role to play in promoting the Mustang, as I was soon assigned to Lincoln-Mercury Division and later to Engineering Staff as a product promotion and information specialist. Over the next two dozen years, however, I did order five Mustangs as my company cars: 1967 six-cylinder manual transmission convertible, yellow with black interior trim and top; 1976 Mustang II white V-6 automatic fastback with red interior; 1979 sister car Mercury Capri, four-cylinder manual, dark green coupe with tan interior; 1984 GT Turbo convertible, red with gray trim and black top, five-speed manual; and 1988 5.0-liter GT convertible, white with red interior, five-speed manual.

      At its 1964 introduction, Mustang was presented mainly as a fun car with a low price, sporty features, and a great fuel economy from its six-cylinder Falcon engine. Over the years, it morphed into Ford’s right-from-the-showroom-floor muscle or high-performance machine with sticker prices today looming into the $70,000s, more a competitor to Chevrolet’s Corvette than, say, to Chevy’s own pony car, Camaro, which made its debut two years after the Mustang as a 1967 model. And Plymouth, the third of Detroit’s low-priced volume car companies, had actually beat the Mustang to market by a couple of weeks, taking the honors for first pony car with its glass fastback Barracuda. Mustang stayed in production in one form or another for the ensuing 50 years, while Chrysler discontinued the Plymouth brand in 2001 and GM ceased producing Camaros from 2002 to 2010. The Pontiac brand is gone, along with Mercury and, with them, their pony cars, Firebird and Cougar/Capri.

      This history of the Mustang looks to the 1920s, not the early 1960s, for its origins in concept; to the late 1930s for low-cost, fun models and Lincoln Continental styling cues; to the mid-1950s for some of its mechanical and design features; and, finally, to the 1960 Ford Falcon and 1962 Fairlane for components that could be scavenged for the Mustang, to speed it to market and minimize the tooling investment.

      There is an old saying that applies perfectly to Mustang: Success has many fathers; failure is an orphan. Many former Ford executives are credited with being Father of the Mustang. This book makes no attempt to resolve that debate; indeed, Mustang was a team effort. And many undoubtedly played key roles at one time or another in its success. Few executives, however, claimed key roles in the Edsel fiasco only a few years before Mustang. No doubt, Mustang team members learned—and applied—lessons from the Edsel failure.

      This volume is not intended to be a guidebook for Mustang model-to-model changes. For one thing, in some years, there were few or no readily identifiable appearance changes. For another, the age of digitalization has ended the practice of bulky press kits containing black-and-white glossy prints. Now, information and photographs come in tiny flash drives for insertion directly into a computer’s hard drive. Moreover, in connection with widespread color printing in magazines and newspapers, the digitized color images tend to be artistic (for instance, dark blue car against black background), which don’t lend themselves for use in Arcadia Publishing books.

      A historian’s job is to interpret the facts of a period of time. No doubt, Mustang fans may argue with some of my interpretations. As they say in pari-mutuel betting events, differences of opinion make races—and that’s what makes the wagering interesting and exciting.

      There are various ways by which the success of a vehicle may be reported: model year (often varies year-to-year and by make), calendar year, retail sales (as reported by news media from manufacturer and importer dealer sources), planning volumes, production (as reported by the automobile manufacturers and published by trade media), import numbers (now rarely used), and new vehicle registrations collected by statistical agencies from state licensing authorities. None are without fault for those doing analysis. In this

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