2015 Mustang: Faux pony car goes generic

With the 2015 redesign of the Mustang, Ford had the potential to reassert its leadership in what I have referred to as the faux pony car field. Instead, Ford took the cheap and easy way out.

First-year sales jumped to their highest level since 2007 (Bunkley, 2015; Automotive News Data Center, 2015). However, despite a strong economy and unusually low gas prices, the new Mustang looks like it will not come close to selling 160,000 units, which is typical of peak years during the last two decades (see graph below).

If this is as good as it gets, what happens when the newness wears off and gas prices inevitably increase? I suspect that the Mustang’s bloated size and anonymous styling could result in dismal sales well before the end of the current platform’s projected production run of eight to 10 years (Kranz, 2013).

The core of the problem is that Ford cheaped out by trying to update the 2005-2014 platform. As discussed here, what was really needed was a much smaller, lighter and more affordable car. Instead, the 2015 Mustang is even bigger and heavier — thereby losing what little competitive advantage it had over the Chevrolet Camaro and Dodge Challenger.

The forthcoming 2016 Camaro went in the opposite direction: It may be slightly lighter than the Mustang after going on a 200-pound diet (Truett, 2015).

To make matters worse, the new Mustang was given a surprisingly generic look. How could Ford designers have lost their nerve on the 50th anniversary of the company’s most iconic nameplate?

It makes sense that Ford would have been concerned about the Camaro, whose sales have run slightly ahead of the Mustang’s for the last five years. But that was no reason to panic.

In the past when the Camaro has nipped at its heels, Ford has tended to move the Mustang downmarket in order to boost sales. For example, the 1974 and 1979 redesigns better positioned the Mustang to navigate the energy crises and inflation of that era. And even though the 1995 redesign of the Fox-body Mustang bloated out somewhat, by the end of its production run in 2004 it had literally buried the much larger and heavier Camaro.

So what did Ford learn from this experience? Its 2005 redesign — the most significant one in a quarter century — effectively copied the discontinued Camaro’s size. The result has been historically weak sales. This may have created a vicious cycle where bean counters insisted that the 2015 redesign should be based on the existing platform rather than starting fresh.

Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that squeezing more life out of the old platform was financially necessary. Under this scenario, one might assume that Ford would at least try to maintain the Mustang’s distinctive look, which in the absence of major packaging advantages would be its chief asset. Instead, the 2015 model steals design elements with abandon.

Perhaps most notably, Ford diluted the Mustang’s uniqueness in favor of copying its arch-rival Chevrolet, such as with the Camaro’s fat-as-hams door sides and the Corvette’s ribbed roof.

To make matters worse, Ford abandoned one of the Mustang’s most iconic styling features — the C-pillar shape of the 1965-66 fastback. In its place, designers slapped on a headroom-robbing teardrop look that could be mistaken for any number of recent sporty coupes.

One might argue that a more traditional C-pillar was needed for the Mustang to be offered in both a coupe and a convertible. The last-generation Mustang’s retro C-pillar resulted in an awkward sheet metal mismatch at the base of the rear-quarter windows. However, I’d counter that a clever designer could work around this problem.

To be fair, styling has never been the Mustang’s greatest strength. Marketing and packaging have generally played a much bigger role in the nameplate’s success, particularly compared to the Camaro. Even the original 1965-66 Mustang has not withstood the test of time against the better sporty coupe designs from General Motors, such as the lovely second-generation Corvair.

Still, why celebrate the Mustang’s 50th anniversary with a bloated and anonymous design that suggests Ford doesn’t get what made the car so successful in the past?

NOTES:

Chevrolet Camaro and Dodge Challenger and Ford Mustang sales figures come from the Wikipedia (2015). Specifications are for base coupes; data from pre-1976 cars comes from Classic Car Database (2016); specifications for 1976 and beyond come from The Complete Book of Mustang (Mueller, 2010) and Automobile Catalog (2016).

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RE:SOURCES

• Automobile Catalog; 2016. “Full detailed specifications listing and photo gallery.” Accessed November 14.
• Automotive News Data Center; 2015. “U.S. light-vehicle sales by nameplate, Sept. & 9 months 2015.” Automotive News. Subscription required. Posted Oct. 5; accessed Oct. 26.
• Bunkley, Nick; 2015. “Breaking through? Ford wants profit surge.” Automotive News. Subscription required. Posted Oct. 26; accessed Oct. 26.
• Classic Car Database; 2016. “Search for Specifications.” Accessed November 14.
• Kranz, Rick; 2013. “2015 Ford Mustang Goes on a Diet.” Edmonds.com. Posted Aug. 14; accessed April 22, 2014.
• Mueller, Mike; 2010. The Complete Book of Mustang: Every Model Since 1964 1/2. Motorbooks, Minneapolis, MN.
• Truett, Richard; 2015. “Camaro versus Mustang: Who has the edge?” Automotive News. Subscription required. Posted May 16; accessed Oct. 27.
• Wikipedia; 2015. “Chevrolet Camaro,” “Dodge Challenger” and “Ford Mustang.” en.wikipedia.org. Accessed October 26.

PHOTOGRAPHS:

• Author’s photo galleries: “2015 Mustang goes generic” and “Pony cars: Decline and fall”