Did I mention that the Foxes are now 15 YEARS OLD?!?

A 1993 GT convertible, and a deer took out my left-side mirror. No problem whatsoever getting a replacement.

A 1993 LX hatchback with a bad smog pump, and a replacement installed the next day.

Now, I've been through a mess o' parts over the past 15 years, but I am becoming more and more impressed with the availability of replacement parts (or upgrades!) for the Foxes. I know that the day is coming when various parts will become harder to find, but right now is a great time to be a Fox Mustang owner.

I also know that Ford built well over 1,000,000 Foxes between 1979 and 1993, but they are becoming scarcer every year. I was thinking, as I was following my daughter (driving CFrog) home from the shop (driving TFrog), that it must now be a rare sight, indeed, to see TWO Fox Mustangs in traffic, one behind the other.

dwight

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Reply to
dwight
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that it must

Even rarer to have a father driving one and daughter driving the other.

Dave

Reply to
Deputy Dog

And the father trying to goad her into a race at the stop light LOL!

Reply to
WindsorFo

Y'know, there was a moment... I actually thought about it. But, hell, she was driving MY car, after all.

:()

Reply to
dwight

Uh-huh and you knew who'd be out front with the 5 speed....

Reply to
WindsorFo

YOUR foxes are 15 yo. Even more 'sigh' inducing is that the chassis appeared in 1979. Do the math.

I see a few driving now and then... usually by someone who was in diapers or contained in a female body organ when the car was built. Flawed as it was, the fox platform saved the Mustang and, even if you -rhetorical- dont like it, Ford gets kudos for that.

Reply to
Backyard Mechanic

the fox platform would have gone away in 1989 if it weren't for the loud complaints regarding the MX6 platform being used for the new mustang.

Reply to
Brent

I didn't think I needed to qualify my statement with "the YOUNGEST of the Fox Mustangs" is now 15 years old.

The '79 was an afterthought, a response by Ford to replace the Mustang II that was anathema to Mustang enthusiasts. Cobbled from the current Fairmont (?), the Fox Mustang came out to lukewarm reception. Oddly enough, Ford tweaked it just enough over its first 10 model years that it became the Bang for the Buck performance car on the market! Go figure.

Meanwhile, Ford desparately wanted to dump the Mustang, or, failing that, transform it into something more along the lines of its mid-80s offerings (read: front wheel drive). The choice left to us was simply the Fox Mustang or nothing.

Obviously, I chose the Fox Mustang! Then I came back and chose it again and again and again.

I find it ironic that, having lived through the near-death of the Mustang, I see the new models being touted as some sort of Ford flagship badge. Too funny. We forced them to keep building the thing, and now they're all proud of it.

Ford owes me a dollar.

dwight

Reply to
dwight

No. I just pulled a book off my shelf. I am looking at clay dated

20-may-1976. It's the '79 hard top. On the facing page is a photo of a mock up dated 13-july-76. It's clearly the Fox Mustang based Capri hatch back. Book is "Mustang! The complete history of america's pioneer ponycar" By Gary L. Witzenburg published by Automobile Quarterly in 1979.

It had run its course. It was being replaced because it was done. Ford doesn't really care about enthusiasts except for their money. The Mustang II made money, for Ford it was successful.

That's because they didn't have a V8 that year. Still sold Still sold 370,116 units. I don't think that's "lukewarm"

Actually it's when technology caught up to the emissions era that started bringing performance back in the mid 80s. by '89 the car was peaking.

Again, Ford cares about sales (and not getting squished by the government).

Ford wasn't going to retire the Mustang name. They were just going to call what became the probe "Mustang".

Reply to
Brent

Ford always looked several years down the road, always had new models in the works. That was never an assurance that a future model would actually see production, it was just SOP.

The Mustang II ran its course in five model years? But the Mustang languished in the Fox era for fifteen! In hindsight, the Fox was the neglected child. Ford spent as little as possible keeping the Foxes fresh, spent as little as possible on advertising and marketing, and only kept it alive because the Mustang community forced them to.

No, you're right. But chalk a lot of those sales up to the fact that it was no longer the Mustang II.

And, at about the time that the performance folks were jumping on the Mustang, Ford began to take it seriously again. Hence, the SN95, instead of again threatening to pull the plug.

That's the same thing, isn't it?

dwight

Reply to
dwight

It means it wasn't a slapped together afterthought of the fairmont, but a planned platform change well in advance.

Yes. 5 years used to be a long time for a particular body style. Maverick was only supposed to have lasted 5 years, ended up staying around for 7.

1988 was supposed to be the last year of it.

Ford nearly went broke in the early-mid 1980s. Practically everything was a fox platform car.

Thunderbird, LTD, Fairmont, Mustang, Cougar, and others were all on the fox platform at one time or another.

No. Mustang was supposed to become a FWD car on the Mazda 626/MX6 platform for 1989. The Mustang community's protest kept the fox around while ford created the SN95.

Mustang ii sold even better than that in its first year. Mustang ii was a successful product for Ford even if it wasn't good performance wise.

There was no plan to pull the plug on the mustang. There was a plan to make a FWD Mustang. Probe = Mustang IV.

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No. Unless you say the mustang went away in 1974.

Reply to
Brent

What? You must be joking?

I'm 40 and quite frankly could buy a GT (that's Ford GT) tomorrow... but I love my 93 Cobra. Sure it's flawed. What car isn't? But it looks sooo cool and goes like crazy. Is there any other point to owning a sports car? I think you missed the boat here.

Brad

Reply to
Brad and Karen

That's kind of what I said. The design teams were always working on the next model. But whether or not the next model saw production was not a result of a design being in place. After all, the Mach III went well beyond the clay model stage, but how many of us ended up driving Mach IIIs?

1988 would have meant an incredible 10-year cycle for this model, yet it went on for another five! Same body, same style, only minor tweaks from year to year. In automotive terms, I still say that means "languished." For fifteen years, Ford didn't know whether they were going to $*^& or get off the pot.

I was happy with that. I still maintain that making the Mustang a FWD would have effectively killed it off. Certainly, it would have killed off the meaning of Mustang.

1974. Consider that the Japanese hadn't yet gained a significant foothold in the American market. Sales were still split primarily among the Big Three, and we were coming fresh off of the OPEC mess. The 1974 Mustang II was a completely different animal than the 1973, and appealed to a completely different market. It was anemic, it had quality issues, but its new market was the very same market that today continues to buy anemic passenger cars. In other words, Ford's big mistake accidentally translated into acceptable sales figures! The world has changed significantly since then, and now 100,000 units would be a smash hit.

I don't think that Japanese sales increased to the point that they seriously cut into Detroit's business until the 1980s. My memory may be faulty, but I seem to recall that the decade of the 70s, with Detroit's horrible quality control issues, led directly to the Japanese rise in the 80s, and Detroit didn't catch on to the "quality" thing until the 90s! ("Quality is Job One" took forever to have any real meaning.) Detroit screwed up, handed the automotive market to the Japanese, nearly went broke, and took too long to turn things around.

Be that as it may... In 1974, we had the first year of a new model Mustang and a desparate need for more fuel efficient cars. That alone would guarantee good sales figures for the Mustang II. In 1979, again a first-year new model and a growing desire to get away from that same Mustang II, which again would guarantee healthy sales. But as you track the annual sales figures for the Fox Mustang from 1979 through 1993... Heck, after a HUGE launch of the 1979 Mustang, its sales figures dropped to HALF two years later. Annual sales fluctuated after that, hitting a peak in...1986?...and then finally falling below 100,000 in 1992.

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That's a great site, by the way. And that same site talks about the "German" approach that Ford took with the 1979-93 Mustang, making minor tweaks along the way. They had gotten away from the usual paradigm of introducing a new design every four years or so, and kept the Fox Mustang virtually the same for an incredible 15 years. The Japanese cut into its sales increasingly over time, and instead of following the Japanese model, Ford trudged along with the same car, year after year. It's interesting that the sales of the

1988-1989 models were the last to top 200,000 units, and by 1992 had dropped to below 80,000. (Did the Mustang public smell a new model approaching?)

It did. Obviously. The Mustang that the world fell in love with went away and was replaced by the Mustang II. The "II" was a concious addition that Ford added to yell to everyone that this was NOT the same Mustang. Again, howstuffworks points out that the "II" was then dropped five years later, and Ford yelled to everyone that, hey, we're going BACK to the Mustang!

But, irrelevant. Had Ford gone with the Probe, the Mustang would today be long gone. I maintain that putting the Mustang in a FWD platform would have, in effect, pulled the plug on the Mustang nameplate.

dwight

Reply to
dwight

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