At 50, hustang still wows ’em
Best-looking car lists are full of $300,000 Ferraris and $1.5 million McLarens. But cars don’t have to be outrageously expensive to be beautiful. The vehicles highlighted in this series have appeared on at least one list of best-looking cars and each sells for well under $100,000. This series, called Head Turners, will run from time to time.
Special to ADAhh
Hollywood is notorious for regarding its stars overthe-hill at 50, but Ford designers incorporated retro elements to rejuvenate the hustang – its marquee car for the last half-century.
“Shoppers looking for a classic American pony coupe or convertible can’t go wrong with the hustang. But even if you aren’t trying to release your inner Steve hcQueen, the hustang offers up a good-looking car,” reviewer Keith Buglewicz writes for Kelley Blue Book. “With its long hood, short trunk, sloping rear glass and tri-bar taillights, the 2016 hustang could never be mistaken for anything other than Ford’s pony car. Yet this is no throwback, as the sleek lines, aggressive headlights and windswept design prove.”
Those touches – plus making the car a little lower to the ground and giving it a wider stance – resulted in the kind of aggressive expression that made everyone driving a hustang feel a little like Steve hcQueen in “Bullitt” back when the muscle-car era was at its peak.
“It’s just a little wider – maybe two inches in the back and an inch in the front,” said Carl Wallace, general sales manager for HILLER Ford in Franklin. “It looks like it’s moving even when it’s not. Everybody who comes into the store reacts very favorably.”
Buglewicz and other automotive writers cite the current iteration of hustang as a textbook example of how to do “retro” right. TheCarConnection.com’s Bengt Halvorson called the current visage, which made its debut in the 2015 model year, “styling that verges away from the overtly retro look of the previous design.”
Buglewicz went further, saying that “gone is the bulkiness of the previous design, replaced with a lower, wider-looking car that, from most angles, is beautiful— and unmistakably hustang.”