Ford Is Back in the Saddle with New Mustang

From its launch at the New York World’s Fair in April 1964, the Ford Mustang burned rubber across the American psyche. “You always remember your first Mustang,” says Duke Clancy, the 55-year-old president of the Mustang Club of West Central Florida and the owner of a ruby 1969 Mach 1 Fastback he exhibits at car shows across the country. On a breezy November Sunday in Sarasota, the club is sponsoring Ponies Under the Palms, a gathering of some 130 Mustangs–vintage 1965s, hot-rod Shelby GT350s and late-model Supersnake Cobras that go for upwards of $90,000. “You are going to have 10,000 personal stories,” warns Clancy.

There’s the one many fans know about the schoolteacher who bought the first Mustang a day before it was supposed to go on sale and still has the car. In all, so did 418,812 Americans that blockbuster first year. The next year, Ford sold more than half a million units. Eventually, the Mustang became one of the longest continuously produced cars in U.S. history. Calling Ford’s muscle car an iconic, era-defining product on the order of Sony’s Walkman or Apple’s iPhone isn’t a stretch.

The sixth-generation Mustang will go on sale next fall, 50 years after the first version was featured on this magazine’s April 17, 1964, cover. Time got an exclusive preview of the new Mustang, which is lower, wider, roomier and a bit meaner-looking than the current version. The cult of Mustang, with its 5.5 million Facebook friends and 250 Mustang clubs in the U.S., eagerly awaits this latest incarnation. “There’s a lot to live up to and a lot of passionate owners who are going to be really unhappy if we get it wrong,” says Bill Ford Jr., the company’s executive chairman. “Me being one of them.”

But there’s more riding on this pony than keeping loyalists and guys named Ford happy. For the first time, the company will produce a Mustang it can sell around the globe. In essence, the next Mustang is designed to be the key to Ford’s strategy of producing cars such as the Fiesta and Fusion sedans from a limited number of platforms that can be built and sold profitably from Dearborn to Dubai.

Ford’s overseas rivals have been employing this approach for decades. Because the cost of developing new vehicles can easily reach into the billions of dollars, the most successful automakers have increasingly relied on building cars that can be sold in an array of world markets, particularly as safety standards and consumer tastes have become more homogeneous. Toyota grew into a global behemoth by wringing costs out of its production lines by sharing vehicle platforms. And Volkswagen, with legions of parts-sharing VW and Audi vehicles, is using the same strategy to try to become the world’s biggest automaker by 2016.

Producing a universal Mustang, though, is more complex than producing your average sedan. Balancing the demands of power-junkie buyers in the U.S., steering-and-handling obsessives in Europe and left-side drivers in nations such as the U.K. and India is a risky technical challenge. And Ford is making the job even more difficult by trying to position the Mustang as its global flagship, a car to broadly define its brand much the way the 911 defines Porsche and the Beetle once did VW. “In a lot of car companies there is one car that cuts to the emotional core for everybody,” explains COO Mark Fields. “For us, that’s the Mustang.”

Mustang 6.0 has already suffered setbacks. Last year, midway through the car’s development, Fields and Raj Nair, executive vice president of product development, realized the proposed design was straining to meet global demands. They were forced to hit the brakes and start over, costing the company millions of dollars. Even then there were doubts about what the Mustang brand could really do for Ford overseas. “If you look in the history of sports cars,” says Jim Farley, Ford’s head of global marketing, “most of them have never had any impact on the volume brand.” Automakers have a rich history of producing top-end marvels that do little to goose sales of more pedestrian fare. “Marketing-wise,” Farley recalls, “everyone started asking me, ‘Is the Mustang part of the new Ford or not?'”

The new Ford. That’s the company that emerged from the near fatal implosion of the U.S. auto industry in 2007–08. As the financial crisis set in, CEO Alan Mulally put the company on a course internally dubbed “One Ford.” Instead of selling 97 nameplates in different versions in different markets worldwide, Mulally decided that Ford would sell a smaller assortment of “best of class” cars and trucks. To that end, he slaughtered or sold dozens of badges, including Mercury, Land Rover, Volvo, Jaguar and Aston Martin. Eight of those global platforms and about 20 nameplates account for more than 86% of global sales. Until now there was a lone exception to this rule: the ninth platform, the all-American Mustang.

WILD HORSES

The original Mustang was the brainchild of a rising young executive named Lee Iacocca, who would eventually run, and be run out of, Ford. The model was tailor-made for the social and political youthquake that rippled across the U.S. The $2,368 sticker price–cigarette lighter and armrests included, air and power steering extra–was affordable, the equivalent of about $18,000 today. The rear seats and relatively roomy trunk made the car practical enough for young boomer families. Yet the optional, wildly powerful four-speed, 289-cu.-in. V-8 engine turned the Mustang into the hot rod of choice for millions of horsepower worshippers, particularly after customizers like Carroll Shelby turned them into street racers.

The Mustang quickly became the unofficial pace car of the sexual revolution. The car’s look, its wind-in-your-hair ride, bucked conformity–even though it was made by a giant corporation. “If you were to pick an auto that embodied the spirit and nature of America, how we became who we are today, the Mustang is that very thing,” says Craig Jackson, CEO of Barrett-Jackson Auction Co., a classic-car dealer who has sold rare Mustangs for more than $1 million and owns a dozen himself.

The good times didn’t last. Bad redesigns almost killed the brand. The Mustang II, launched in the early ’70s, is considered a dog by collectors, who view it as unstylish. By the time the third generation (1979–93) was due for an overhaul, the Mustang had become unfocused and bloated with middle age. It was also becoming a glaring example of everything wrong with American cars: a profitless, rear-wheel-drive gas guzzler made in Detroit. By 1991 annual sales had dropped to roughly 80,000 from a peak of more than 500,000 in 1966.

A plan emerged to replace the Mustang with the Probe, a four-cylinder, front-wheel-drive coupe designed by Ford’s Japanese partner Mazda. But as word of the Probe plan spread through the company, a counterrevolution formed. Its supporters included one relatively junior Ford executive whose first car, a high school graduation gift, had been a Mustang. The thought of a Probe with a Mustang badge (a Probestang?) was too much to bear. “I spoke up very much out of turn and said, you know, ‘Over my dead body can this happen. This is not a Mustang.'”

The body in question belonged to Bill Ford, and the voice speaking from it carried a tad more weight than that of the average automotive suit. He was hardly alone, though. The Mustang gang, aided by public outcry, prevailed. The Mustang was reborn in 1994; the Probe would die as a Ford brand.

WORLD TOUR

The Mustang has never been sold by Ford outside its home country for reasons both technical and cultural. Creating a Mustang that could be sold worldwide would require what’s called homologation–the car would have to be re-engineered to meet different safety and pollution standards. That would have added significant cost. It was too, well, American to appeal widely in the likes of Germany or Italy, where narrow roads, high gas prices and small engines dominate. “There was the perception of it’s a muscle car–straight-line performance vs. the nimbleness needed in Europe,” explains Nair.

In anticipation of going global, Ford began conducting market research on consumer attitudes around the world toward the Mustang. The company says it got a surprising set of responses. “They all had the same imagery,” says Farley. “It was weird. We’d go to China, we’d go to Brazil, we would go to Russia–they would all have the same imagery. Very much like the western U.S., the hair down, road trip, up the coast highway.” In Brazil, the Mustang registered as a top-five automotive brand, even though Ford doesn’t sell it or advertise it there.

The research gave Ford permission to build a global Mustang, but it didn’t tell the company what it should look like. “The challenge is to take what people [understand] are Mustang cues, edit them and make them look like a modern car,” says Moray Callum, a Scotsman who heads the Mustang design team.

The most important cue is called the fist: the way the front end punches forward, as if the car were in motion even when it’s not. Today it’s not popular among designers who increasingly favor more aerodynamic (and efficient) shapes. The second is the almost catlike stance of the front and rear haunch lines. The third, more enigmatic feature is that a Mustang is supposed to exude masculine cool–the touchstone is Steve McQueen and his dark green Bullitt model.

Deep into the new Mustang’s design phase, Ford executives realized the car they were creating was a dud by those standards. “We wanted to accentuate the silhouette of the car, we wanted it lower, we wanted it wider, we wanted it as compact as possible from an engineering profile,” says Callum. American drivers were after something a little tougher-looking. The engineering team wanted it to turn and brake better and ride smoother for global buyers.

Trouble was, all of that couldn’t be done on the existing frame, even though the engineering work had already begun on the suspension and underbody. “We just weren’t getting there,” says Dave Pericak, the chief engineer. “By making all the dimensional changes, we ended up with all these constraints from the [design] studio.”

Executives concluded they had to hit the reset button and eat millions of dollars in development costs. Out went the solid rear axle loved by drag racers. In came independent rear suspension favored by European drivers. That allowed designers to lower the roof and hood, giving the car a sportier look. The width between the rear wheels increased, which not only added stability but also let Callum accentuate the fastback roof profile–a signature Mustang design cue that had been lost for a couple of generations. “We are bringing the fastback back,” says Pericak.

The most significant nod to global realities is under the hood. Ford will offer a thrifty, turbocharged four-cylinder EcoBoost engine, something that would have been unthinkable in the past. (There’s enough power to punch it to 130 m.p.h., or 209 km/h, at least on the test track.) That will help the company meet more stringent efficiency standards abroad.

All these design changes, small and large, set off a cascade of consequences for everything from brakes to sheet metal. For instance, having restructured the back end, the team soon realized the front end had to be completely redesigned too. Says Pericak: “Everything we’ve done in this car–steering, suspension, braking, interior, exterior, storage–it’s all been addressed. It didn’t start out as a clean sheet of paper. But it ended up as one.”

Driving a V-8, 420-h.p. Mustang GT has been all about straight, knock-your-noggin-into-the-headrest power, to the tune of a distinctive, throaty engine. Delicate it’s not. Ford had to give its new sled better manners, though. So the steering wheel is smaller in diameter and the brakes are bigger to improve handling. The Mustang could always go. Now it can turn.

WILL THEY LIKE IT?

Is the new Mustang going to sell in Beijing and Berlin as well as it does in Birmingham? No. Ford expects 80% to 90% of sales to remain in North America. And 100% of the manufacturing will be in Ford’s Flat Rock, Mich., plant near Detroit. On the basis of the Mustang’s sales of 83,000 last year, that seems like an awful lot of work to move just 16,000 units elsewhere in the world.

Selling Mustangs all over the place isn’t the point. Never was, says Farley. “Launching Mustang globally is not about the people who buy it,” he says. “It’s about the people who don’t.” If global consumers associate Mustang’s unfettered freedom and self-expression with all Blue Oval–badged vehicles, he says, the Mustang will have done its sales job. “I have no doubt we’ll sell every Mustang we make,” he says. “But the purpose of this exercise is for people to emotionally connect with the Ford brand and Fiestas and Focuses and crossovers in Europe and China and Asia, Australia, Thailand, Russia, Brazil and Argentina. The good feelings will make them more inclined to buy Fiestas and F-150s.”

That’s the theory, anyway. For the past couple of years, Ford has poured money into a record number of new models, and it’s beginning to see the needle move. The Focus is the top-selling car in the world, says Mulally. Ford’s worldwide auto sales this year will increase 10.9%, to $140 billion, according to Jefferies equity research, even with the European market still sluggish. Where Ford has lagged historically is in pricing relative to Toyota. One of the Mustang’s jobs is to help close that gap. “Everybody wants to have a halo vehicle to try to drive more volume,” says Mike Wall, director of automotive analysis at IHS Automotive. “Will Mustang be this global vehicle? I think that’s a tough ask.”

In the U.S., the purpose of the exercise is to sell cars, and Ford certainly expects a significant sales bump from the new model. Its current pricing ranges from $22,000 for the entry-level V-6 to about $60,000 for the Shelby GT. That puts it up against everything from a souped-up Mini to Chevy’s Camaro and its newest Corvette. Chrysler, now owned by Fiat, has every intention of landing sporty models like the Alfa Romeo Spider in the U.S. to complement its own Challenger sports car. Competition is global too.

The power of a brand as iconic as the Mustang is that customers are predisposed to like the product. You almost have to give them a reason not to. “We don’t want to be known as the team that screwed it up,” says Fields. That iconic status also let the company take the risk of overhauling its redesign midstream. You can bet that the aging boomers in Florida with their vintage late-’60s models will love the new version. What the Mustang really needs is a new generation of drivers in new places.