Ford’s New Mustang Catches Up to Its Past
For teenager Kenny Admire, the canary yellow 2005 Ford Mustang GT was pure eye candy, and then some.
He spotted it in the parking lot of a Villa Park shopping center, the first of the completely redesigned, retro-styled Mustangs he had seen. For half an hour he sat in the lot and stared at the car, waiting until the driver showed up so he could hear the deep rumble of the 300-horsepower engine.
“Mustangs are just great cars -- everything I want,” said Admire, a high school senior from Orange who owns a 1998 model and dreams of trading up.
Ford Motor Co. loves to hear that kind of talk. The automaker has a lot riding on the new Mustang, the fifth-generation model of the iconic “pony car” that goes on sale late this month.
“It’s one of the most important new cars for Ford in years,” said industry analyst Wes Brown of Iceology, a Los Angeles-based market research firm. “It needs to be a success to show people that Ford can make cars worth going to the dealership to look at.”
Ford for years has relied heavily on pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, which account for virtually all of the company’s automotive profit. It could use a hit on the passenger car side of the ledger.
The Dearborn, Mich.-based automaker more than doubled its net income in the first six months of 2004 -- after years of reducing costs, cutting jobs and squeezing its suppliers -- but its share of the U.S. auto market keeps declining. In August, it had fallen to 19.7% from 24.1% five years ago.
Rivals with fresh passenger cars, such as the hot-selling Chrysler 300 sedan, have been wooing and winning the customers Ford needs to reverse its slump.
Hoping to fight back, the company plans a flurry of new cars in the next year, including the Five Hundred and Fusion mid-size sedans, the Freestyle crossover -- a wagon-like model with better fuel economy than an SUV -- the limited-production $140,000 Ford GT sports car and the Mustang.
“A Mustang is a car you can see coming down the road,” said Larry Erickson, chief designer of the 2005 version. “It doesn’t look like anything else.”
Since the first Mustang appeared in 1964, Ford has sold more than 8 million. “Its success defies any logical explanation,” said Brock Yates, a columnist for Car and Driver magazine. “Ford got the formula right” with an inexpensive, sporty car that appealed to a broad array of buyers.
Ford has fingers crossed that the trend will continue. The company’s marketing machine, aided by 250 Mustang clubs across the country, has spread the word about the new car, and its U.S. dealers have more than 25,000 advance orders. The company expects to build and sell about 160,000 of the ’05 Mustangs, up from sales of 140,350 last year. Ford division President Steve Lyons said he believed the company could build and sell more but would “rather be sold out than oversupplied.”
Auto reviewers say the design pays homage to the most popular Mustangs of the late 1960s, including the model Steve McQueen drove in the film “Bullitt.”
The ’05 follows the classic formula of a long hood, short trunk and sloping fastback roofline, with headlamps and fog lamps staring out of a squared-off black mesh grille. The interior is a throwback too: There’s polished aluminum on the dashboard and round speedometer and tachometer with needle indicators rather than digital readouts.
The six-cylinder model delivers 210 horsepower and starts at $19,410, and the base model of the V-8 GT costs about $25,000 -- making it the least expensive 300-horsepower hot rod on the market. The ’05 model rides on new suspension, and reviewers say it’s a giant step forward in handling and ride comfort from the previous model. Still, the exterior is what draws attention.
One auto writer who drove the ’05 said the car generated plenty of looks on Southern California roads -- often from young men on freeways steering with one hand while frantically attempting to grab snapshots with cellphone cameras. One teenage girl at a hamburger stand posed with the car while her boyfriend took photos. Young drivers in souped-up Hondas and BMWs swerved across traffic lanes to get a better look at it.
Burt Boeckmann, owner of Galpin Ford in North Hills, has more than 100 orders for the new Mustang even though none are yet available; the few out on the road are being driven by reviewers. Boeckmann, a Ford dealer since 1953, contends that the Mustang has survived the ups and down of the U.S. car market for so long because it has retained many features that made it a hit when it was launched four decades ago.
“Ford came out with a car that people really liked. They liked the name, the looks, the drive, the room,” he said.
Indeed, mass appeal has been the Mustang’s strength.
The car, long marketed as a youthful performance model, fits slow-cruising 60-year-olds as well as tire-burning teens, said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. The average age of owners, at 42, falls between those extremes.
In addition, a sizable proportion of Mustang buyers are women -- about 40%, high for a sports model.
Ford’s pony car was unveiled at the New York World’s Fair on April 17, 1964, the brainchild of Lee Iacocca, then-president of the Ford division. He envisioned the car as an American answer to European sports touring sedans. He wanted a car that looked good, appealed to families as well as young enthusiasts and wouldn’t require purchasers to take out second mortgages on their homes. The first Mustang, a six-cylinder coupe, cost $2,368.
The four-seater Mustang caught on as quickly as Beatlemania. Ford ramped up production, and Mustang sales peaked at 549,426 in 1966. The car spawned a host of muscle car competitors from Ford’s rivals in the Big Three, including the Chevrolet Camaro, Oldsmobile 442 and Pontiac Firebird and GTO from General Motors Corp. and the Plymouth Barracuda and Dodge Challenger and Charger from what was then Chrysler Corp.
Competitors nibbled into the Mustang’s sales, and after the 1970s oil crisis, sales of most muscle cars nosedived because of rising gas prices and stricter environmental standards.
The Camaro, 442, Firebird and Barracuda are defunct. Yates says GM and Chrysler “lost the energy to compete” in the market segment.
Only the Chevrolet Corvette, a two-seater sports car sold continually since 1953, has a longer pedigree than the Mustang among domestic sports models.
In the last two decades, Mustang sales have held relatively steady at about 140,000 units a year. It “remains the last man standing in a niche laden with opportunity,” Yates said.
GM attempted to resurrect the Pontiac GTO this year. But sales of the Australian-made car, despite a powerful V-8 engine, have been tepid. Meanwhile, DaimlerChrysler plans to bring back a sporty Dodge Charger model next year, but it will be a four-door sedan.
So, for now, Ford has this corner of the market pretty much to itself and keeps attracting a broad spectrum of customers, such as longtime Mustang fan Shan Jacobs.
The 54-year-old grandmother from San Diego expects to be one of the first to take delivery of an ’05 model when they begin arriving at dealerships this month. Her car will be a bright silver Mustang GT with 300 horsepower and a ground-shaking 1,000-watt stereo system.
Jacobs also has a silver 1966 Mustang coupe that she has owned since graduating from high school. Mustangs attracted her, she said, “because I love their looks, they’re practical -- and I love the looks I get when I’m driving one.”
“Driving a Mustang is something special,” she said. “It gets in your blood.”
