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The Rebirth of the Mustang
Part 1 - Iacocca's New Pony
By Karl Ludvigsen
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When I asked him what he felt was his single most important contribution to the Mustang II, Lee Iacocca answered quickly:
"The name - not changing it."
It's an answer that says a lot about Ford's new little sporty car, and about the men who made it. For one thing, it says the Mustang II is so different from the other cars of that name that it could easily have been called something else. For another, it says that Ford knows when it has a good thing going, and tries not to mess it up. And the chief not-messer-upper is 48-year-old Lee A. Iacocca, the president of Ford Motor Company.
Iacocca was general manager of the Ford Division in April 1964 when his face appeared on the covers of major magazines along with the car that had been his personal brainchild, the original Mustang. In those days his office was on the fifth floor of the division's headquarters building in Dearborn. Now he's on the 12th floor of Ford's World Headquarters in one of the same offices where he fought so hard, as a general manager barely wet behind the ears, for the money to build that first Mustang in what seemed like reckless quantities at the time.
Glancing occasionally out the broad 12th floor windows, through which the distant towers of downtown Detroit looked unusually attractive, like some remote Xanadu, Iacocca reflected on the car that must now be thought of a Mustang I: "I've said it a hundred times and I'll say it again: The Mustang market never left us; we left it." Through two style changes it kept getting bigger and bigger. As designer Gene Bordinat put it, "We started out with a secretary-car and all of a sudden we had a behemoth on our hands. " We stopped the 460 (sic, engine) in it," said Iacocca, "but we had all the other engines in it."
As Mustang and its stablemates kept ballooning in size and power, sales of ponycars peaked and then declined as buyers expressed their interest in smaller sporty cars. Was it time to stop making Mustangs? Iacocca didn't think so. "We have a little more at stake here. We couldn't very well say that we'd phase it out. We had a hell of an incentive to go back to the original Mustang car. The three million Mustang owners have a lot of miles on their cars. They're reasonably happy with them. And then they see a little car out there that reminds them of what they had..."
Three million Mustangs have been built, but many more people than that number have fallen under its spell. Considering used-car sales, some five million persons have been, or are now, Mustang owners. And considering family members, at least 15 million people can be said to have had close contact with the Mustang I. Generally they were "reasonably happy." Surveys showed that 80 percent of the buyers of new 1965 Mustangs were either completely or very satisfied with their cars, as opposed to the national average of 66 percent of owners who'd say the same thing. By 1969 the percentages were down to 59 and 56 respectively, but still in favor of the Mustang.
But how do you go back to the original Mustang? Doing it literally would have meant basing the new car on the Maverick, which is surprisingly close to the first Mustang in its main dimensions and drive train choices. But that wouldn't have been much of a change from what Ford already had. As part of a survey called Project 80, Ford's advanced planners were tracking the trends toward more luxury in smaller cars and the public craving for higher-quality construction. The looked at a Grabber version of the Pinto, among other things, and concluded there was room for a sporty, specialized small car in the Ford lineup.
Figures told part of the story. The planners took a look at what they call the "sport subcompact" category. Into it, they lumped all the small imported sports cars, plus cars like the Toyota Celica, the Capri, the RX-series Mazdas and the Opel Manta, and they found the sales trend skyrocketing. From 83,000 units in 1965 they jumped to 311,000 in 1972 and are estimated at 378,000 this year. Ford has a close look at that market because 110,000 of those '73 sales will be Capris. This was a market where Ford thought it could do business. But was the right car for that market necessarily named Mustang?
Sniffing out the right trail to follow was the Roman nose of Iacocca, unchallenged (since the departure of Bunky Knudsen) as Ford's No. 1 car man. Says chief engineer Bordinat: "Lee was the first guy to come along who had the feeling for cars that had existed in General Motors for some time." That feeling was telling him to think small and sporty. Iacocca: "When I look at the foreign-car market and see that one in five is a sporty car, I know something's happening. Look at what the Celica started to do before the two devaluations nailed it!" He's convinced that this is an important chunk of the market that American makers won't be able to ignore: "Anyone who decides to sit this one out just ain't gonna dance!"
Why have wallflowers GM and Chrysler left the floor wide open for Iacocca and Mustang II to strut their stuff? How come Ford, with its many-faceted Pintos, Mavericks and Capris, and now with the new Mustang II, has consistently been firstest with the mostest in the American smaller-car field?
"There's no question," responds Iacocca, "that our bread-and-butter volume at Ford has always been in the smaller car. Some of it is - I hate to use the word - heritage. Like it or not, that's been our history. Of course I like to think that we're placed a lot better in the rest of the market than we used to be. But I think we've got a solid slot in the small-car market. Of our total production, we run 37 to 38 small cars, and GM runs 18 percent. Now, I hope we start the era of small-car luxury and elegance."
No theme has been hammered at hard in the making of this car. Iacocca summed it up: We wanted to do a little car that had some class in its fits and finishes. I told 'em: 'Don't screw around with a lot of heavy moldings!' " Bordinat: "He's badgered the hell out of us on that point." Says Bill Benton, involved in planning Mustang II before taking over the Lincoln-Mercury Division, "Iacocca will be out there in the showroom and he'll run his finger around the molding, and if it so much as scrapes him some poor son of a gun will get it!"
This drive for what one Ford man rashly called a "jewel-like quality" even in the base Mustang II has been transmitted to Ben Bidwell, recently transplanted from the L-M Division to the Ford Division general managership. "The No. 1 objective of the company for this car," he said, "is better quality control. We expect to build a better car for less money than the guys on the other side of the water." One way he hopes to do it is by concentrating production in a single Dearborn plant where assembly problems can be quickly found and fixed. Another is by designed-in quality. Window moldings are less likely to scratch the presidential fingers; body joints were critically reviewed and revised during early pilot-line assembly. Most importantly, money - rectangular green money - was spent to make the Mustang II's equipment standard "a pretty high cut," as Bordinat puts it.
Most of the money was put where the owner looks all day: in the interior. That was Iacocca's idea, and the man directly in charge of doing it was L. David Ash, a sports-car fan whose credentials included styling work on both the original Thunderbird and the first Mustang. He took his cue form interiors that, in his words, were "not entirely restrained European concepts like Jaguar, Rolls-Royce and Mercedes."
At Iacocca's request, Ash and his gang built a complete interior mockup that even had exterior sheet metal attached, and wheels, so it gave the feel of a real car. "It was a time-consuming property to build," remembers Ash, "but it served its purpose very well. We didn't have to go through an elaborate series of meetings to determine everything. It was all approved right there. We were on a crash basis to get it done, and it was very enthusiastically received." Well it should have been. The interior looks terrific, for the very good reason that Bill Benton gave: "There's a lot of money in there."
Ash went all-out in building the mockup. "We took a long look at what we considered the best not only in design but also in execution. In the course of it we used leather. We put everything in it that we could conceive of that connotes restrained elegance plus the get-up-and-go that says Mustang - something of a firebreather. About 90 percent of that mockup is in the top-line Mustang II now." Dave said a mouthful when he summed up the impression given by the interior, even in the low-buck line: "It's kind of a mini-T-bird."
That's a giveaway to the Ford philosophy that has made the Mustang, in all its guises, such a success. When the first one appeared in '64, Iacocca said he visualized it as a "poor man's T-bird," and Henry Ford II's favorite name for it - ultimately vetoed - was T-bird II. Just like the first one, the Mustang II will be many kinds of cars to many people, but it will be at its best when it's seen as a plush personal car, a little Thunderbird.
How, you might ask, did Ford do it? Mustang II will be basepriced four hundred dollars more than its 1964 counterpart, despite years of inflation, and it was a car that didn't have such standard goodies as a tach, four-speed gearbox, disc brakes and high-level ventilation. "Where do you think I got the money to do it? asks Iacocca rhetorically. "I took out a foot of wheelbase, a foot of iron! We started with the most efficient platform in the company and put four people in it, favoring the driver and the front seat passenger."
Mustang II started small, to save money where it doesn't show, but it was tough to keep it that way. It was tremendously tempting to boost the power options, for example. "I've driven a V-8 in this car," says Iacocca, "and it's fantastic. But to keep some discipline in the system we kept it down to the smaller engines. Otherwise it'd be overweight before we got it on the market! It's tough to keep an efficient four-passenger car with a trunk in the system and make a 2500-pound target anymore."
Some of the money saved by shortening the Mustang was spent on TLC for its chassis to meet the "image" standards that dad been set up for the new car. This was done under development engineer Paul Nyquist: "We take all the parts and see if they make an automobile. They usually don't, on the first try." The automobile he has to produce is clearly defined when the program begins. "In about 12 categories covering ride, handling and NVH 'images' are established at the start, expressed in percentages of a Pinto, or Capri or some other target car. Then we figure out what parts we have to make that come true."
Nyquist stared with a Pinto stretched two inches but less and less of the economy car was left as the work continued. "We don't throw away interchangeability," he says, "but our activity told us what we had to have to make the car work." The had to have more weight to meet the crash standards. They smoothed the ride with rubber rear-spring clamps and an unusual floating mount for both the engine and the trailing struts from the front suspension: "We wanted to keep the front-wheel impact loads from pounding into the body. Now the engine is a damper for the suspension inputs, and we have the suspension mass to help damp the movement of the engine." The floating mount cost money. In a drive-off in July 1972, its cost was justified to Ford product development vice president Harold MacDonald.
Keeping the lid on the power options kept Mustang II low in weight and price. It also meant that it couldn't have tire-burning performance. "It'll be compromised," admits Iacocca. "It's not gonna slam you back in the seat. And if you put air and automatic on a 2300, you do not exactly have a bomb on your hands." But he feels the performance will be sufficient, and is at least as good as it can be initially. And other Ford men admit that they've "backed into" an interest in small cars and good gas mileage that's boomed far beyond their most optimistic estimates at the time the Mustang II was planned.
A car with the same name as its predecessor but smaller in size and lower in performance? In Detroit, that's what's called a double-cross. It's a surprising tactic and one that's especially Ford-like. The corporation did it with "Capri," which was a huge Lincoln before it became a fussy British coupe and then a very successful Ford of Europe sporty car. Ford also did it with "Fairlane," the name of the low-line full-size car before it was spun off for the pioneering intermediate in 1962. And Iacocca made sure that people would know the new car, smaller or not, was still a Mustang.
The Mustang "mouth" look had been an Iacocca inspiration 10 years ago. "I felt that after three million Mustangs we should have some of the cues: the mouth, the sculpture on the sides." Bordinat seconded the motion: "We wanted to hang onto some of the cues of the original car, because they're sort of friendly." Some of the early design proposals didn't make the grade because, say Bordinat, "they didn't have enough Mustang."
Like Mustang I, Mustang II's lines are a result of styling runoff among several Ford design studios. Participating were the Ford, Lincoln-Mercury, advanced design and Turin-based Ghia studios, all working to the same interior package dimensions. Iacocca favored the competitive approach: "I like runoffs, if there's a lot at stake - especially if you're going into a new market." Bordinat: "We've had some good luck with that sort of thing. The young turks, especially, tend to get ginned up when they know they're in competition." In fact the final design that was picked for the Mustang II was the work of a "young turks" group within the Lincoln-Mercury studio.
Starting in August 1971 with the interior package drawings and a Pinto, Ghia was the first to complete a running car as part of the Mustang II program. Recalls Iacocca: "From the time Gene and Hal Sperlich and I went over to give them the sketches, to the time it arrived at my house, it was 53 days!" The ability to build prototypes that fast was one of the big reasons why Ford bought Ghia. The Turin group did two cars for the program. "They did a fastback car for us, the Ancona, that influenced our fastback," Bordinat says. "But it had a lot of tire exposure and roll-under. We showed it to sports car buffs, who rejected these measures. This impressed me."
This reaction from a selected market was one of many that Ford gathered in product clinics for proposed new Mustangs, private showings of experimentally body designs in competition with others that are in the same slice of the market. "You don't do it for them to design the car for you," Iacocca explains. "We don't abdicate responsibility. They do tell you something when they turn it down out of hand, when it's a real turkey." Where are the clinics held? "We always go to California. If they go in California, they'll go anyplace."
One of the designs, called the "Anaheim notchback" after the Southern California town where it was clinic-tested, laid the proverbial egg. It was a boxy notchback coupe with a semi-pagoda roof inspired by the other car from Ghia. According to the clinic reactions, it couldn't be given away in Southern California. But when the testers opened their doors in San Francisco, including the notchback on a last-minute hunch by Iacocca, it substantially outscored the fastback! "That's why we have the two roofs," admits Iacoccca. "The only time you do that is when you have a market that's equally split."
When the San Francisco returns came in, Mustang II had already been styled as a one-body-style car, a three-door fastback. "Once we developed that," say Iacocca, "the question came: Could we get a believable notchback off that body? Now we're equipped to go as high as 50 percent of production on each one. I have a feeling that the women will prefer a more conventional style..." At the clinics, the interior was never in doubt. Dave Ash: "It researched extremely well. They consistently put it in a higher price class."
What feel did Ford get from the clinics about the impact Mustang II would have on the sporty imports? Iacocca replies with a wry grin, "I'd say, oh, a third of the people in the research - when we showed 'em the car - said, 'I loved it until I heard it was going to be built in the U.S.!'" He feels, though, that buyers are recognizing that American quality isn't so bad as more and more of the imports are equipped with electrical options and other gizmos that cause trouble. And he's confident that the price will tell it's own story. "The average foreign car buyer is going to look at this and think we've slipped a cog because the price is so low."
Can Mustang II add to the total number of Ford cars sold in the U.S.? Iacocca: "If half of 'em are incremental, say 200,000, it'll be fantastic. As for the other half, the Pinto will feel it, and so will the Maverick, in '74. But in '75 you won't recognize the Maverick. It'll be Mercedes-style in design, fit and finish." There'll be cannibalism at Ford in 1974, in other words, as Mustang II bites into the sales of other Dearborn products, but Iacocca hopes to minimize it by positioning the "images" of his products with great care.
At the press preview, Bidwell said: "We believe Mustang II may be one of those textbook examples of the right product at the right time." The time might have been different. Originally the "Arizona Project," as it was code-named, was set for debut in April 1974 - exactly a decade after Mustang I. But Iacocca pressed his people to "squeeze a little time out of it," which they did, making this one of the best-timed announcements in auto history.
There are many pleasant parallels between the first Mustang and this one. Iacocca was squarely behind both cars. Both were launched during boom periods in auto sales. Both were based on chassis elements for popular cars, the Falcon then and the Pinto now. Both were styled through competitive runoffs. Both were introduced with two body styles and a high level of standard equipment. Both were brewed with a healthy portion of T-bird and both came off the line of the Dearborn Assembly Plant. Ford has put the lightning rod up just as high as it can to try to get it to strike twice.
The Mustang I, as Ford never ceases to remind us, set a record for sales in the first 12 months after its introduction of 418,812 units. This topped the first-year record then held by another Ford product, the Falcon, at 417,174.
The question is: Could Mustang II be a contender for this honor?
On the face of things it doesn't seen likely. Production figures of 330,000 for the 1974 model year have been mentioned, for example, and that's a long way form the record.
Iacocca see it a little differently. "With all-out overtime," he says, "we could build 396,000 - maximum. Since the world's record is 419,000, you don't have to stretch your imagination much to set a new record. I think we could find 23,000 sets of parts somewhere..."
And he is confident that Ben Bidwell can sell whatever number he builds. Says Bidwell: "This part of the market will go past a 50 percent share in two years." - including everything from the compacts downward in size. That share is projected to be 37.8 percent in 1975, and in it will be a hell of a lot of little Mustang II's, pleasing cars that are perhaps more puppy-dog than mustang but none the worse for that in today's auto environment. As the smog starts clearing, the view from the 12th floor in Dearborn looks pretty good.
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