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when it's seen as a plush personal car, a little Thunderbird.
How, you might ask, did Ford do it? Mustang II will be base priced 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-Ievel ventilation. "Where do you think I got the money to do it?" asks Iacocca
rhetorically. "I took outa 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 25OO-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 had 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.
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"In about 25 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 have to make that come true."
Nyquist started 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." They 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
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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 a 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, says Bordinat, "they didn't have enough Mustang".
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