Splicetoday

Pop Culture
Apr 17, 2009, 09:58AM

45 Years Ago Today: The Ford Mustang

The pony car.

The two Ford execs saw a vast market literally rolling before their eyes, and, according to legend, the notion of a sports car with a back seat was one of those "ah-hah" moments. If Ford could dilute the European ethos just a bit by making the cars a bit more practical and a lot more affordable, Iacocca figured, the company would sell a few thousand.

 

He was right, but boy was he wrong. Ford didn't sell thousands of them. It sold millions of them.

 

The pony car is easy to define. It was small by Detroit standards, with sporty styling. It had a back seat for your kids and a usable trunk for your stuff. And the rear wheels were driven by an engine & mdash; ideally a big V-8 — mounted up front where God and Henry Ford intended.

 

Pony cars may not have had the finesse of a European sports car, but they made up for it with brute force. A small-block V-8 can make up for a multitude of handling deficiencies.

 

The Mustang was successful like the Beatles were popular. Ford figured it would sell around 100,000 in the first 12 months of production. It sold 10 times that number in the first 18.

Discussion
  • The Mustang *was* the Beatles of cars. Sure beat the Dodges my family had. In '74, a college roommate of mine, now an intelligence officer overseas, spent all the money he had on a re-conditioned '65 fire engine red Mustang, and polished and looked under the hood, and all sorts of car stuff that's beyond me, on weekend. Within a month of his purchase, after too many bottles of Schlitz, he totaled the car, narrowly missing a utility pole. I was in the backseat, packed in with four others. The car never hit the road again.

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