Go Deep With the Mustang Prototype
The original Mustang prototype looked completely different than anything else on the road.
1964 was a good time to be young. So good, New York City saw a full evening pass without a single juvenile crime. That was the night the Beatles performed on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” After Beatlemania had subsided, another icon from 1964 lived on: the Ford Mustang.
Ford has been building the Mustang for over 50 years now. However, the car Ford’s engineers initially proposed was a far cry from what America’s youth would eventually embrace as a cultural icon and the spirit animal of the U.S. auto industry. It was almost a very different car.
The Mustang that wasn’t
The prototype Mustang didn’t even come with a roof. Instead, it featured a built-in roll bar, but you probably wouldn’t need that because of its mid-mounted V-4 engine. The car would have handled like the Porsche Boxster of its time.
It was high-tech, thanks to a spaceframe built in California, and it would have featured front-wheel drive — a fundamental change that would have made the Mustang a completely different car from day one. Ford made a promotional video about the many forward-looking components that made up the Mustang. Among the high-tech parts, there was even an available air compressor to comfort overheated passengers.
Even though the car seen in Ford’s video never came to be, design elements were carried on to the production car. One of the most important is the instantly recognizable Mustang emblem. While it has seen some iteration over the years, the classic Mustang badge remains instantly recognizable.
That promotional video reveals some wild 1960s prototyping practices, including the application of something called Excelsior. The original body was more wedge-shaped than the production-spec pony car, a popular concept design at the time. However, it did feature the side vents integrated into the final Mustang design.
Other aspects of the Mustang’s construction that were kept from the prototype included its unibody approach. This is typical these days but it was quite futuristic for 1964. The ‘Stang’s classic tuck-and-roll leather upholstery was also present, along with front disc brakes, which became available on the production Mustang in 1965.
It’s a fascinating look into what would become a cornerstone of American culture, but it begs the question: What would the car in the video have led to if it went into production?
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