World willing to pony up for Mustangs, Ford learns
It took 50 years and more than nine million Mustangs before Ford decided its beloved, blue-collar icon was mature enough for a grand tour of Europe and the rest of the world.
The strategy’s success suggests the company should have shipped them sooner.
Near the end of 2015, the latest version of the famous car rolled into 140 countries.
Decked out for its 50th anniversary with a major update in design and engineering, it was met with a rush of orders from fans who had been waiting decades to get one. By 2017, Mustang sales were swooning in the US as the new model’s novelty faded, but foreign buyers proved more faithful, fuelling a steady stream of orders to the plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, where the Mustang is made.
The pony car may be as American as bourbon, Steve McQueen and, well, the mustang, but today, one in four of these machines is bound for drivers in China, England and Germany (Ford says it’s even sold 17 in Bulgaria). This fever dream for generations of young American men – the stuff of Bruce Springsteen fables – has finally gone continental.
“It’s very much a piece of the American dream that has actually been able to move,” says Ian Fletcher, an auto analyst for IHS Markit in London. “It’s still a very, very niche vehicle, but people see it and they want to buy it. It’s a heart-and-soul thing.”
All told, Ford said demand for the Mustang outside the US is double what it expected. Capitalising on that success, this year Ford added Brazil and five other countries to its Mustang paddock. What’s more, foreign buyers are a hugely profitable piece of business, since Mustangs headed overseas tend to be decked out in the most lavish trim. A bareback version starts at around $26,000 in the US, but buyers abroad are limited to a “Performance Pack”, pushing up the starting price to almost $54,000 in England and Germany. It turns out that Ford hit a masterstroke in product strategy, even besting such continental sports cars as the Porsche 911, which the Mustang now outsells in its German home market. The coup also revealed a missed opportunity, providing ample evidence that Ford left piles of money on the table over the decades.
“It’s always funny when you see the ‘experts’ in an industry get something this wrong,” says Karl Brauer, executive publisher at Cox Automotive. “It is so genuinely and intrinsically American, there was always an assumption it wouldn’t work as well elsewhere,” Mr Brauer says. But the blustering American nature of the Mustang turned out to actually be its best asset.
Most Mustang buyers in Europe are ignoring the small, fuel-sipping engine entirely, according to Mr Fletcher. They want the V-8 in spite of the bigger petrol bill that goes with it.
Selling an American car abroad is trickier than stacking a boat with shipping containers. Assembly lines have to be retooled to put steering wheels on the right-hand side – which isn’t cheap. Countries have their own safety and emissions regulations, which often vary. A range of engineering specifications, from how headlights are configured to the height of a bonnet, need to be met before a vehicle can enter a market.
There’s no risk that herds of Mustangs will take over Europe’s highways – Porsche is still doing just fine – but any car maker still in the business of building a sports car should be on warning. The Mustang’s global momentum hasn’t been lost on General Motors and Fiat-Chrysler Dodge. Chevrolet’s Camaro is due for a major reworking in 2021 and an overhaul is already overdue on the Dodge Challenger. If Ford’s results are any measure, both of those machines have plenty of room to run.