The new Mustang logo marks the countdown to the pony car's golden anniversary.
Ford Motor Co. is saddling up to celebrate the 50th anniversary of that original “pony car,” the Mustang.
And it’s going to get plenty of help, with 50 different companies planning to join in for the celebration by producing a wide range of products meant to commemorate the special occasion, everything from Mustang-emblazoned jackets to watches to videogames. They’ll use a new black-and-white logo featuring the familiar galloping horse over the words, “50 Years.”
The Mustang is “a timeless statement,” contends Ford’s Chief Creative Officer J Mays, who oversaw the creation of the new logo – and who is playing a crucial role in the development of the next-generation Mustang expected to come to market sometime next year, closer to the official golden anniversary.
Iacocca and the original Mustang shared both the Time and Newsweek covers.
The automaker revealed the first coupe on April 17, 2014, just a few days before it officially made its public debut at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. It was an instant hit, helping land Ford’s then-boss, President Lee Iacocca on the covers of the era’s two dominant news magazines, Time and Newsweek.
Ironically, while the galloping horse has been the image Ford associated with the original Mustang, the car’s original designer, John Najjar, was actually a great fan of the most successful fighter plane of World War II, the P-51 Mustang. Company officials liked the name but thought the equine image was more appropriate.
Introduced as a 1964-1/2 model, the first Ford Mustang was available for as little as $2,368. The fast-looking coupe wasn’t nearly as spirited as it appeared, however, with its compact, 170-cubic-inch engine and 3-speed manual transmission. That would soon change as the automaker rolled out an increasingly powerful series of engine packages and, in subsequent years, a procession of new bodies.
The need to put some pep into the pony created a partnership that would last for decades, Iacocca turning to race car driver-cum-entrepreneur Carroll Shelby to offer some help pumping up the performance – and to lend his name to a special edition version of the Mustang. With only a brief time out during a short association with Chrysler – following Iacocca to the smaller maker – the tall Texan continued to work with Ford on a procession of ever-more-powerful Mustangs, including the current, 662-horsepower Shelby GT500.
(A year after Carroll Shelby’s death, his Las Vegas-based “tuner” house, Shelby American, plans to introduce a new 1,200-horsepower custom version of the Mustang at this week’s New York Auto Show. Click Here for that story.)
While Ford hopes to ride high in the saddle as Mustang gets ready to turn 50, the pony car has been facing some struggles. After decades leading the pack in the muscle car segment, Mustang has been tripped up by the reborn Chevrolet Camaro, a lead the General Motors division hopes to widen when it also introduces an updated version of its own pony car at the New York Show.
That puts all the more pressure on Ford to get it right when it launches the next-generation Mustang. It’s not set an official date for that big event but most industry observers are expecting to see that coincide with the original car’s debut next spring.