A few month's ago I bought a 2012 Ford Mustang. you can see it in a previous post. It's not my first, I had a 1969 many years ago. The 2015 model year also marks the 50th year of continuous Mustang production. Not many American cars have been around longer than that. The Corvette (1953) has, and also the Jeep (1941), The three have all been around so long for good reasons, there is something quintessentially American about all them. This post is about the Mustang. There is a lot of history below, but not the kind you are expecting. it's not a run down of different years and models. I'm not going to re-tread all of that. There are better places than this little blog entry to read the definitive 50 year modern history of the Mustang automobile. I'm going to play around the edges and maybe come up with something special instead.
Between 1955 and 1957 Ford had the Thunderbird, a hip two seat sports car made to compete with the Corvette and the various imported Marshall Plan sports cars coming over from from Europe after the war. The T-Bird looked sweet and (only available with a V-8), it was a real gas to drive. It was the aspirational car of the time.
In the same way that Richard Dreyfus chased T-Bird driving Susanne Sommers all night without ever hooking up in "American Graffiti", the T-Bird represented something existential we we are reaching for. Americans want the romance and freedom that a beautiful, fast, two-seat automobile represents. But something holds us back, a four-seater seems so much more practical and makes us less guilty about owning it. Our Puritan superego creeps up on us. What are Bob and Jane Stationwagon next door going to think when we bring home that impractical roadster?
So, in 1958, the Thunderbird gained a back seat, more luxury, more pounds, and Ford lost it's only sports car. The result? Thunderbird sales doubled, of course.
There were some really beautiful Thunderbirds in the sixties, but Ford eventually lost the overall theme for the car. Ford never quite knew what to do with the T-Bird. By the mid-seventies, it had become just another poorly made, under-powered American behemoth. Ford finally had the right idea in the 80s with the svelte Turbo Coupe, but, Thunderbird was just too many things over the decades. There was no Thunderbird "idea" other than the somewhat vague concept of a "personal luxury coupe". The last Thunderbird model was a 1956 inspired two seater, another failed attempt to jump in on the retro design craze that began in the early 2000s. It was a decent enough car that lacked that certain "thing" the original had. It finally disappeared for good after 2005.
Jumping ahead (or back) to the early 1960s. The VP and General Manager of the Ford Division of Ford-Lincoln-Mercury was this guy named Lee Iaccoca. You know him, Lee Iaccoca, the hero of 1980s American business, the guy who brought you the Chrysler K-Car and the Dodge Minivan; the guy who saved Chrysler Corp. by buying up AMC just to get his hands on the Jeep division and tossed out the rest; THAT lee Iaccoca.
One thing you can say about this Iaccoca fellow; as car guy, he had a feel for the zeitgeist, and so he did way back in '61. The baby boomers were going to start driving soon, so he got the Ford boys to work on a youth oriented car. It had to have style. It had to be affordable. it had to have certain smallish dimensions that he insisted on, It had to be sporty, it had to have four seats, It had to be based on an existing model so it could use parts already in inventory.
What came out of all this in April of 1964 was the Mustang, a car with absolutely gorgeous sheet metal, but based on the economy Ford Falcon chassis. It had a looong sexy hood and a short rear deck. It had seating for four (not two). It came in coupe, fastback, and convertible styles. Most importantly, this baby had options, option, options. It had several engines ranging from an unimpressive 6-cylinder to a high-performance 289 cubic inch 4-barrel V-8, a choice of transmissions, final gear ratios, rims, trim packages, and interior and exterior colors.
It could be a commuter car or a race car. Whatever you wanted the Mustang to do for you, you could special order it for your own desires and your own budget. It didn't matter if you were the secretary next door or Frank Fucking Sinatra, baby, you could have YOUR Mustang. The Mustang was the great democratic car. Murica! It was so popular that it became a technical feat for Ford just to keep up with the orders.
The car also had a name, a good name.
50 million years ago, the Eocene:
As great forests in North America began giving way to grasslands, the decedents of tiny, forest dwelling proto-horses adapted to life on the expanding plains. They developed flat teeth for grinding grasses, long legs with single-toed feet for speed to out-run predators. The first true members of the genus Equus arrived during the Pleistocene, about 4 million years ago. These earliest equines were the the ancestors of horses, donkeys, and zebras. They ranged over North and South America, and expanded northwest over the Bering Land Bridge to Eurasia. Ironically, these early equines died off in the Americas during last ice-age of 10,000 years ago while they thrived in the old world, where a species known as Tarpan (Equus ferus ferus) was domesticated by people.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, the distant ancestors of these early horses (Equus ferus caballus) returned to the Americas with the conquistadors. As domestic animals tend to do, some escaped and became feral. They discovered the ecological niche long ago abandoned by their ancestors and became the North American wild horse, the Mustang. Mustangs were captured, tamed and bred by native Americans, who then created the beautiful, famous horse cultures of the Great Plains.
Back to the 20th century:
The United States Army Air Force had a problem. Bombers and men were being shot down, lost, killed in the frigid skies over Nazi Germany in horrific numbers. What was needed to protect the bombers was a fighter escort plane that could fly all the way from England to Berlin, mix it up with the best machines and pilots of the Luftwaffe, and then fly back. That plane came in the form of a beautiful and advanced airframe made by North American Aviation that was powered by England's mighty Rolls-Royce Merlin engine and carried an extra fuel tank under the fuselage. it was called the P-51 Mustang. Mustangs and their pilots sweep the Luftwaffe out of the European skies in preparation for D-Day.
The P-51 aircraft was so well loved that Ford's prototype sports car of the early sixties was named after it. It soon became apparent, though, that the word "Mustang" conjured up mental images of cowboys and Indians, of plains and deserts, of red sunsets and galloping steeds running free. America, baby! Thus, the production car developed it's equine theme, which it never lost.
Over the decades there was the loud, fast, high octane muscle car era, competing cars from Chrysler and AMC, the rope-a-dope of fuel shortages and emissions standards that clobbered Detroit and created the Mustang II, a plan to create a front-wheel drive Mustang which became the Ford probe, and finally, stunning leaps in technology making all modern cars into the amazing machines they are today. Through all of this, the Mustang somehow managed to keep it's basic character: something to take to the drag strip, or to help you get lost with a friend on some back road on a Sunday drive, or to just zen out on your afternoon commute so you can arrive home feeling like a human again. Whether it's classic or modern, has a V8, a V6, or an Ecoboost 4, an independent rear suspension or a Fred Flintstone axle, it's still a real Mustang, so just drive it, have fun, and screw the critics who say it's not.
