The kids call it being “savage”. I refer to it as “blunt-force honesty”. To others, it’s simply stating the plain facts, feelings of others be damned. In today’s society, laying everything out on the table for the world to see is often considered a no-no…you might hurt feelings or you might offend someone. The line between being truthful and being hurtful on purpose keeps getting moved as the years go by. Now, granted, you wouldn’t walk up to your grandmother and tell her that she smells just like the hog farm you passed by on the way to her house, but at the same token would you be afraid to politely inform her that the flowers are wilting on the kitchen table for her sake? She might want to do something about that aroma before dinnertime.
Why that tangent? In 1979, Ford was in the middle of a renovation that, whether they would admit it or not, was spurned on by Chevrolet’s downsizing in 1977. The new Panther platform was being unveiled, as was the new Ford Mustang and it’s carbon-copy twin, the Mercury Capri. A very far cry from the Mustang II that had gone from the appropriate car of the times to a mini-Mark IV that didn’t look or act like a Mustang should, the Fox-chassis car promised lighter weight, better economy and best of all, a fresh face to start a new decade with. Then the smiling face of Bob Mayer took the keys to a baby-blue early production 1979 Mustang Ghia with the 302 V8…and while it’s not quite an automotive roast, this man isn’t gentle about telling the truth or assigning blame where it’s due. It didn’t hurt that he had been up in Dearborn earlier that year to do a feature on how cars are built in Ford’s plants…all the more stinging when footage from those interviews was used to bash in the problems with the little blue Fox.
If you are under the age of thirty and have wondered why your parents talked so badly about American cars, watch this. The Mustang was one of the better choices for 1979, if you can believe that.
With the vast amount of effort and organization involved in setting up production of a new car design it’s too bad that one UAW guy on the line couldn’t put an electrical plug together properly or tighten a ground, whatever, and that then is what hits the news broadcast. Would it not have been fair to ask Ford to fix the obvious problem and then re-test so as to skew the whole report? But yeah, the mfr. should have caught it themselves. The early days of all-plastic dash assemblies brought us squeaks and rattles from places we’d never heard from before (that would be generic and exist in every car) and someone at Ford should have sent a guy to see the carpet vendor, you can bet they knew about the fitment problems and were just blowing it off. Better testing and QA would have identified all those issues but again management and the numbers people would have to care. Ford would go on to run lots of “Quality is Job 1” advertising in the eighties but a bud’s Mustang GT purchased during that later period had a numerous interior fitment problems, a mis-trimmed hatch edge hitting the opening sheetmetal and t-tops that gave you a cold shower in every rain…ridiculous issues to be continuing to have for years. At-least most of the car was pretty good, the ’79 was anyhow a step in the right direction.
Junk