Ford’s sixth-gen Mustang is wider, faster and meaner-looking; it’s also designed to woo drivers around the globe.
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."