We Love Ford's, Past, Present And Future

We Love Ford's, Past, Present And Future

The '73 Mustang convertible dresses up with optional polished aluminum wheels and Mach-style twin-scoop hood. The 1973 Ford Mustang brought the pony car into the final model year of fourth generation. The federal government now required front bumpers to sustain low-speed shunts without damage. Though Ford and other automakers met the rule with some pretty awful-looking cowcatchers, Mustang fared quite well, as body-color bumpers were now standard for all models and stuck out only a little more. The bumpers absorbed energy through an I-beam mounting bar with a box-section bracket attached to two longitudinal rubber blocks that gave way on impact, then bounced back to original position. Elsewhere, base models and the Grande got a grille insert with larger eggcrates, and parking lights on all '73s migrated from beneath the bumper to within the grille, where they were stood on end to resemble running lamps. The usual trim shuffles occurred, and Grabber colors were dropped in favor of quieter "Ember Glow" metallics. 51) and, for the first time, a twin-scoop hood.

52). The Mach 1 got a revised honeycomb grille texture and new lower-body striping. The uptown Grande hardtop now included a useful parking-brake warning light. As it had since '71, the Grande came with a "halo" vinyl roof, so-called because the covering left a slim band of body color around the side windows. The EGR routed gases from the exhaust manifold through a vacuum valve into the carburetor to be diluted by the incoming fuel/air mixture. This permitted leaner carburetor settings but also diminished horsepower except on the 302 V-8 and 250 six. The two-barrel 351 sunk to 173 net horsepower, the four-barrel version to 259. As noted earlier, the 351 HO got the heave-ho, a victim of weak demand and too much required finagling to satisfy the federal air marshals. Equally disheartening, four-speed manual was now limited to the 4V 351, and automatic was mandatory with the two-barrel unit (though most buyers ordered that anyway).

In other technical news for '73, power front-disc brakes were newly standard with either 351 V-8 and for all convertibles, and both disc and drum brakes were enlarged for cars without power assist. Interiors adopted flame-retardant materials to meet a gruesome new federal "burn rate" standard (four inches per minute), and some hardware was redesigned to be less injurious. Prices went up a bit for '73. Thus endeth "Bunkie's Mustang, the one that looked like it hit the wall," as Ford marketing exec Hal Sperlich derisively termed it. Knudsen, of course, was long gone by 1973, but many in Dearborn were still mighty unhappy with the Mustang he left behind. Said design vice-president Eugene Bordinat: "We started out with a secretary car and all of a sudden we had a behemoth." Lee Iacocca was even more displeased. Though 1971-73 Mustangs are often criticized for excessive nose-plowing understeer, especially in tight corners, sportier models like the Mach 1 could be reasonably agile for their size and heft. But Mustang was about to rejoin the world of sensible sportiness, thanks to Iacocca's push for an entirely new car in the spirit of the original mid-Sixties blockbuster. Though this one would be no less controversial in its way than the 1971, 1972, and 1973 models, Iacocca's new brainchild, for better or worse, was going back to basics for a brave but battered new automotive world.

The big news this week is, of course, Ford's first mass-market battery electric car, the Mustang Mach-E, and their decision to call that car a Mustang. Whether you think the branding and styling of this electric crossover as a Mustang is a brilliant strategy or something close to a war crime doesn't really matter, because it's done. I may as well address how I personally feel about Ford's branding of this as a Mustang: I'm okay with it. I mean, it's not like carmakers haven't tacked visual styling cues from their more successful or iconic cars onto their other, unrelated cars before. Look at the Jeep FC series, for example. These were an entirely different design from the original Jeep, but Willys decided they can just slap a whole Jeep face on it and boom, it's a Jeep. The Mach-E isn't exactly the same, but it's similar. Brands have always taken their best-known cars and tried to get their shine to rub off on other cars.