The Mustang sold four times its forecast and invented the pony car
Ford expected to sell about 100,000 Mustangs a year. Launched at the New York World's Fair on April 17, 1964, it passed that mark in three months and sold over 400,000 in its first year, the biggest car debut since the 1927 Model A. It has been built continuously ever since.
The trick was reuse. To hit a list price of US$2,368, engineers borrowed most of the chassis, suspension and drivetrain from the plain Falcon and Fairlane, so dealers needed no new spare parts and mechanics already knew the hardware. Donald Frey ran the engineering in a record 18 months while Lee Iacocca championed the project. The rush showed: some early cars had a horn ring stamped Ford Falcon, hidden under a Mustang trim piece.
Nobody quite agrees who named it. Ford credits stylist John Najjar, a fan of the P-51 Mustang fighter plane. Another account says market researcher Robert Eggert, a quarter horse breeder, got the idea from a book about wild mustangs his wife gave him, and the name won focus group tests easily. Designers had preferred Cougar or Torino, and Henry Ford II wanted T-bird II. In Germany the truck maker Krupp owned the name, and because Ford declined to pay about US$10,000 for it, the cars were sold there as T-5s until December 1978.
The first car was actually sold on 14 April 1964 at a dealership in St. John's, Newfoundland, days before the official debut. A white convertible appeared in the Bond film Goldfinger that September. Rivals soon piled in, including the Chevrolet Camaro, Pontiac Firebird and Dodge Challenger, and the whole class took the Mustang's nickname.
Over the decades it has ridden on Falcon, Pinto and Fox underpinnings before gaining its own platform in 2005. In August 2018 Ford built the ten-millionth Mustang, a white V8 convertible matching the first.
Source: Ford Mustang
