Ford Mustang – Driven To Write

Try A-Coke-Ah (Part One)

Lee Iacocca – The Ford Years

Searching for a horse’s mouth account of that pioneering purveyor of horseless carriages, a recent read was the well known autobiography of the irrepressible, late and lamented Lido Anthony (Lee) Iacocca. (1924-2019) With the internet nowadays a deep-mine of information, such a move maybe described as unnecessary, but to this author at least, that misses the point.

For those of you who seek the inner nuances concerning his fathering of the Mustang, therein lies a smattering – just eighteen pages given over to that mother of all car launches, but since other aspects of his career overwhelmed such matters, we ought not Continue reading “Try A-Coke-Ah (Part One)”

Cats Will Fly

Dearborn 1967: product segmentation was strictly for the birds.

The 1958 Thunderbird would prove to be a pivotal product for the Blue Oval. Not only did the Square Bird transform the fortunes of the model line, the ’58 T-Bird popularised the concept of the personal luxury car amongst the American car buying public, creating an entire sector it would subsequently bestride. Not only that, the second-generation Thunderbird illustrated to Dearborn management that it was possible to Continue reading “Cats Will Fly”

Short Story (Part One)

Brevity is an art.

Image: The Author/ Encyclautomobile fr/ Wouter Huisman

Although a much less common course of action compared to stretching a pre-existing vehicle, several car manufacturers have at times explored this avenue nevertheless. There can be several reasons for this; the main ones being motorsports competition requirements, creating a smaller and cheaper entry level variant, responding to customer requests or complaints, and unique geographical market circumstances.

The just for fun variants are left out of the equation here, those (however amusing in some cases), for the most part being one-off amateur concoctions and mobile billboards. Continue reading “Short Story (Part One)”

A Promise Fulfilled (Part One)

A retrospective on a car that went from cynical marketing exercise to icon for a generation of drivers.

That Ford chose to produce the Capri was as logical as night following day. The US Ford Mustang, launched five years earlier and, like the Capri, based largely on a humble sedan (the Falcon), had been a huge sales success. Ford had expected to shift around 100,000 Mustangs annually, but 400,000 were sold in its first year and a further 600,000 in its second year of production. Little wonder that, on seeing these numbers, Ford Europe decided to Continue reading “A Promise Fulfilled (Part One)”

Wild West Hero

We encounter a visitor a long way from the prairie.

All images: DTW. Apologies for the poor lighting conditions.

There’s a commonly employed saying which goes along the lines of, ‘if you’re going to be a bear, be a grizzly’. The notion being, I suppose, that the apogee of ursine ambition is to be as large, hairy and fearsome as possible. It’s also another way of suggesting that one ought not settle for second-best in life. All in all, as a statement by which to Continue reading “Wild West Hero”

I Found A Song For The One Who Visited My Planet

Alert regular visitors to the corner shop we call DTW will certainly recall our recent discussions of American cars sold in Europe.

By way of a follow-up article for what will undoubtedly be a fine spring morning I have been delving into the recent past (2006). This is to look at a few other American vehicles that made it to this side of the Atlantic. That’s just what you want to read as you tuck into your cornflakes and toast. Before some of you jump up shouting “You must Continue reading “I Found A Song For The One Who Visited My Planet”

Find Me Under The Batholith

It was with immense surprise that I discovered Ford marketed the Mustang in the UK in 1980. An advert indicating as such appeared in Motor, September 8 of that year.

I thought that the offering of the present Mustang was something of a novelty. It’s not, apparently.

The ceaselessly industrious team at carsalesbase declare Mustang sales of about 15,000 units in the Lord’s year of 2017 and about 13,000 units in the Lord’s year of 2018. It all goes towards making it possible for Ford to be able to Continue reading “Find Me Under The Batholith”

Anniversary Waltz 1978 – This Year’s Model

Driven to Write forces down some Texas tea.

A year which appeared to consist of little but tit-for-tat nuclear weapons tests by opposing cold war powers, that uniquely played host to three different Catholic pontiffs, where the Red Brigades kidnapped and murdered former Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, and where Spain finally renounced the last vestiges of dictatorship by declaring a democracy, 1978 experienced its share of geopolitical turmoil.

Distraction was the order of business, with cinema-goers enjoying the top-grossing musical, Grease, while the music charts remained dominated by disco’s glitterball. The Bee Gees’ soundtrack to 1977’s Saturday Night Fever held the number spot in the American billboard chart for a death-gripping 21 weeks, with Night Fever the year’s top-selling single. In the UK, it was German (open inverted commas) recording artists (close inverted commas) Boney M, with Rivers of Babylon, which kidnapped the affections of the mainstream UK record buying public.

But not all. While Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ 1978 release attempted to Continue reading “Anniversary Waltz 1978 – This Year’s Model”

Should The Waves Of Joy Be At One With The Tide? Well, Should They?

Despite the enormous size of the automotive industry and the enormous importance of aesthetics, the academic literature on the topic is sparse.

render — Citroen C5 sketch: (c) citroencarclub.org.uk

There can be found in any bookshop a shelf of ten to thirty books on marques, full of glossy images and I am not talking about these. A few books supposedly on automotive design exist and these are inadequate. This has a few nice pages on rendering. The rest is fluff, sorry to say. The same goes for this book which is mostly about drawing not design.

Car Styling and Auto & Design purport to tell the design story and do often have revealing studio photos of rejected clay models and theme sketches that lead to the final cars. Both, however, are essentially very dependent on the industry that provides the information and so, apart from Robert Cumberford’s articles, they only Continue reading “Should The Waves Of Joy Be At One With The Tide? Well, Should They?”

The Unease Spirals Down

Recently I discussed how one detail can ruin a car.

Here we see the 1979 Ford Mustang which, overall, can’t claim to be a very strong or admirable bit of work. All the details accumulate to result in a deeply compromised design. Ford really struggled with this. The decision of production engineers to Continue reading “The Unease Spirals Down”

Mustang Micropost: Compare and Contrast

What do you do when your product’s character derives from a particular look? Here’s how Ford revised the Mustang for 2015.

2015 Ford Mustang and its predecessor (right)

The overall change is that Ford have accentuated the horizontal character of the vehicle, front to back. While the old car looked more brutal and Aston-Martin-esque, the new one has smoother blends, and the two features that interrupted the front-to-rear flow are gone: the heavy B-pillar and the J-shaped scallop. At the front the lamps are slimmer and wrap around to the sides, again stressing horizontality and width. I think the previous car looked more masculine and robust. The new one loses some of that in the name of flow. Continue reading “Mustang Micropost: Compare and Contrast”

J Mays’ Ford Legacy

How successful were J Mays’ Blue Chip Fords?

I start by admitting an unjustifiable antipathy towards J Mays, which I must put to rest, now. It is based purely on the fact that he once called a 1 Series BMW a ‘shitbox’. Although I have admired several Bangle era BMWs from first viewing, the 1 Series was never one of them, but there is something unseemly about one designer slagging off another designer’s work in public. Continue reading “J Mays’ Ford Legacy”