Autos: Ford's Young One

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Thus the most important selling job that Lee Iacocca did at Ford was to get the Mustang going. The project started quietly in January 1961 when Don Frey, a bright young engineer whom Iacocca had made his product planning manager, asked the advance styling department to draw up designs for a little sports car. When it produced a trim clay model of a little two-seater that looked like a rocket, Iacocca invited Grand Prix Driver Dan Gurney and other racing buffs in to give their opinions. Recalls Iacocca: "All the buffs said, 'What a car! It'll be the greatest car ever built.' But when I looked at the guys saying it—the offbeat crowd, the real buffs—I said, 'That's for sure not the car we want to build, because it can't be a volume car. It's too far out.' " Iacocca decided that he did not want a car to compete against foreign sports cars, which sold only about 80,000 a year in the U.S., but against Chevrolet's successful Monza, which was selling about 250,000 a year. After a competition between the Ford, the Lincoln-Mercury, and the corporate styling studios, Iacocca looked at all three together and picked out a Ford Division model that somehow seemed to pop out at him: "It was the only one in the courtyard that seemed to be moving." He won complete agreement on the spot from Henry Ford, who had been skeptical about the new car in its very early stages but came around after several sessions of eloquent argument by Iacocca. Ford appropriated $50 million to tool up the Mustang.

"In the Mustang," Lee Iacocca said at this week's premiere on the World's Fair grounds in New York, "Ford has actually created three cars in one." Aside from the basic $2,368 model (which is not so basic; it comes with bucket seats, padded dash, and leatherlike vinyl upholstery), anyone who wants to turn his Mustang into a little Thunderbird can load it with just about every luxury option Detroit has, from automatic transmission to a big V-8 to air conditioning. Finally, the sports-car purist who wants performance and more horsepower can spend up to $3,500 by adding a European-style stiff suspension, disk brakes and a fourspeed manual transmission. Next year Ford will also add a fastback model to the line.

At the Shrine. Having been burned so badly with the ill-fated Edsel, whose styling it unaccountably failed to market research before its introduction, Ford this time conducted 14 studies on the Mustang, ranging from interviews with Monza owners to name and pricing studies. Its staff of 20, the industry's largest, found, among other things, that the car's outside appearance ranks first with the under-25 crowd and that four seaters are preferred 16-to-l among sports-car owners.