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The 1965 Ford Mustang is unquestionably an automotive design icon, and nearly every generation of Mustang has some connection to that original car. Because it's such a universally-known vehicle, we were amazed to see all the different designs that were being considered. Head of Ford's archives Ted Ryan recently shared photos of design proposals for the original Mustang on Twitter that he and Jamie Myler found, and we reached out to them to find out more.
The photos were taken on August 19, 1962, and they are proposals for the Ford Mustang. Ford had committed to doing a Falcon-based youth-oriented car at this point, and it did have plans to launch the car in 1964 for the 1965 model year. But after having little success with early design proposals, the company asked all of its design studios — the Advanced Studio, Lincoln-Mercury Studio, and Ford Studio — to submit proposals. With only about two years before the planned launch, Ford was understandably short on time, and it's believed that the studios only had a month to create and present these designs.
Sources: Ford Archives (images), autoblog.com (context)
