Coming to market

The timing of the car's introduction coincided perfectly with the first wave of the postwar "baby boom" which was heading off to work in a strong economy. Incredibly, no domestic manufacturer up until that time had anything remotely resembling an affordable yet youthful and sophisticated automobile aimed at this burgeoning market, and Iacocca knew it. Despite his repeated attempts to receive the go-ahead to produce such a car, his proposals fell on mostly deaf ears. Because the company was still smarting financially after the demise of the Edsel Division in late 1959, upper management at Ford under Robert McNamara (later United States Secretary of Defense under Lyndon Johnson) wasn't willing to take such a major risk.

Still, Iacocca persevered and was given the green light to produce the Mustang in mid-1962, which gave the design team only eighteen months to design and develop the car. Not only did the project wrap up in under eighteen months, it wrapped up under budget as well thanks to the decision to use as many existing mechanical parts as possible. As far as the design itself was concerned, Ford stylists basically threw out the company handbook on design limitations, pushing the stamping technology of the time to its limit in such design areas as the sweep of the rear lower valence and the remarkably complicated front end stampings and castings. Curved side glass was used as well, but at a price since the technology to produce distortion-free curved safety glass was still fairly young. And though most of the mechanical parts were directly taken from the Falcon, the Mustang's body shell was completely different from the Falcon's, sporting a longer wheelbase, wider track, lower seating position and overall height and an industry first: The "torque box." This was an innovative structural system that greatly stiffened the Mustang's unitized body construction and helped contribute to its excellent handling, at least compared to other cars of the time.