10 Things You Didn't Know About the Ford Mustang

A fun look at the popular muscle car's history.

Benjamin Hunting | 

May 21, 2024 | 5 min read

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The Ford Mustang celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2024. Since 1964, it's enjoyed a storied career as one of the company's most popular cars and become a high-performance icon.

To commemorate the legendary car's historic milestone, here are 10 things you probably didn't know about the Ford Mustang.

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Ford Didn't Want to Build the Mustang

The Mustang resulted from a plan to produce a sporty-looking but affordable small car for the masses. Starting in the early 1960s, Ford's market research suggested an inexpensive car that prioritized style would be a big hit.

Despite the data, the company's CEO, Henry Ford II, wasn't onboard. He repeatedly rebuffed the design teams that came to him with sketches and ignored the bean counters explaining how much profit it could generate for the brand.

It wasn't until Vice President Lee Iacocca directly intervened and convinced Ford that a youth-oriented coupe was a "can't fail" idea that the executive agreed to move forward with the program.

It was a smart decision. Ford sold more than 400,000 Mustangs in the first year.

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The Original Ford Mustang Started With Wings — and Almost Had Paws

In keeping with the cost-conscious nature of the Mustang's development, the first few designs focused on spiffing up the existing Ford Falcon, reorienting from its strict commuter-car roots to something more visually and dynamically interesting. When this didn't fly, engineers switched to using the Falcon's basic platform but with a more attractive body style.

The Mustang name wasn't yet in the mix, however. The winning design proposal was, in fact, known as the Cougar, a name that would appear on a later Mercury version of the car. Mustang was a late addition to the naming derby and was chosen after a positive response from Ford leadership.

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There Have Been Three One-of-One Mustangs

Carroll Shelby helped Ford build some of its most exciting high-performance models. He also built a handful of vehicles that were intended for production but for various reasons never made it.

Three such Mustangs — the 1967 Shelby GT500 convertible, 1967 Shelby GT500 Super Snake, and 1968 Shelby Green Hornet — are the only ones of their kind ever produced, and they remain the rarest Mustangs in history.

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The 1980s Mustang SVO's Four-Cylinder Beat the 5.0 V8

When is a four-cylinder Mustang faster than a V8? When it's the early 1980s and Ford's Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) division tuned the coupe's turbocharged 2.3-liter four-cylinder engine to produce 205 horsepower and 248 pound-feet of torque.

Those numbers were enough to push it past the heavier, smog-choked GT's 5.0-liter V8 in a straight line.

Ford and 7-Up's Failed Collaboration Resulted in a Fox-Body Special Edition

In 1990, Ford and soda brand 7-Up had a big promotion planned during the NCAA basketball finals that would have seen 30 winners drive home in green-metallic Mustang convertibles with V8s and white tops.

At the last minute, the contest was canceled, but Ford decided to build the prize cars anyway. They even went a little overboard and sold more than 4,000 of them. Aficionados call them 7-Up Mustangs.

The Ford Mustang Almost Switched to Front-Wheel Drive — Twice

Ford has seriously considered swapping the Mustang from rear-wheel-drive muscle machine to front-drive compact coupe twice in the car's history. The first time was at the end of the 1980s, when the Ford Probe very nearly replaced the Mustang in dealerships before selling alongside it instead.

The second was in the early '90s when the company looked at the entry-level platform underpinning the modest Escort as a potential Mustang successor.

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The SN95 Mustang Was Inspired by Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger

When Ford did move on from the Fox-body Mustang — a chassis design borrowed from the Audi Fox from 1979 to 1993 — the look of its 1994 replacement was the result of a battle between a trio of pop-culture icons. The company's design studio turned out three concepts, named Rambo, Bruce Jenner, and Schwarzenegger.

The Schwarzenegger retro theme won out to become the SN95-generation car.

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Ford Built an SVT Cobra R in Three Mustang Generations

The Cobra name is well known to Mustang fans, but Ford also built a much more exclusive SVT Cobra R in three generations of the car. Offered in 1993, 1995, and 2000, the Cobra R was the high-performance capstone of the Fox, SN95, and New Edge body styles.

Sold as a coupe only, the Cobra R featured a stripped-down interior, an upgraded suspension, gobs of horsepower, and in the case of the 2000 Cobra R, extroverted aerodynamics and a side-exit exhaust.

A V10 Mustang Prototype Was Built but Never Produced

When Ford started manufacturing its 4.6-liter modular V8 in the 1990s, it also produced a 6.8-liter 10-cylinder version for its heavy-duty trucks and vans. It wasn't long before some Mustang engineers built a secret V10 project of their own.

They didn't just cram a truck engine into the Mustang; that would have been too tall. Instead, they crafted a custom block by melding the front cylinders from one V8 to a (mostly) intact 4.6-liter, resulting in a 5.8-liter V10 that made around 450 horsepower.

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The Mustang Has Thrice Celebrated Its Hollywood Fame

The Mustang played a starring role in the 1968 movie "Bullitt" alongside actor Steve McQueen. Ford has paid tribute to that Highland Green 1968 fastback with modern versions of the vehicle on three occasions.

The first Mustang Bullitt tribute model was built in 2001, followed by a second in 2008 and '09 and a third in 2019 and '20. Each of these vehicles boosted performance while wearing paint and old-school styling cues intended to evoke the original movie car.