Survival — one of the primal instincts. We’re intrigued by it. We flock to movies about it. We’d like to believe we could do it. One of the most popular reality TV shows, Survivor, is about, well, survival (although I’ve never watched the show — I don’t believe it’s reality!). Now hang with me on this. How have our Mustangs fared in the survival game?
If you’ve been around this hobby a long time, there are certain people and projects you’re familiar with. One such person is Jim Smart. His project was called In Search of Mustangs. Before the Ford database was available to the public, before anyone else had the idea of trying to put together the Mustang “collection,” Jim launched his career on that idea in the ’80s. He wanted to locate and document every ’65-’73 Mustang produced. A large task, indeed. Even larger when one considers the Internet wasn’t available to the public and word processors were in their infancy. His teamwork with Jim Haskell eventually led to the publication of a couple of books known as the Mustang Production Guides.
Fast forward to the present. Now, with the Internet and almost everyone being online, In Search of Mustangs is being launched into the 21st century. Think of it as ISOM 2.0. It’s available at www.insearchofmustangs.org. This website will no doubt become a valuable resource to the Mustang community.
Some of the material in the Mustang Production Guides is being made available on the website. This will include some significant production dates as well as details about some of the special Mustangs that have been produced through the years. Included on the website is a link to the most popular free data plate decoder at www.mustangdecoder.com for assistance when entering data for a particular Mustang or just to determine what your data plate tells you about your car.
Do you have a ’65 or ’66 Mustang but don’t have the door data plate for it? There’s an extremely slick search routine for the database. With it you can, for example, hunt for other Mustangs close to your serial number to get a good estimation of the original build date of the car. You can even perform complex searches such as “How many ’66 Mustangs have been found that are Candyapple Red with 289-4V engines and four-speed manual transmissions?” It’s an online Mustang database.
Are you into statistics or just curious about the survival rate of the Mustangs? You can see with bar graphs the popularity of your Mustang’s paint color. Ditto for trim, transmissions, or any other data. Easy-to-use features allow quick determination of, say, how many Mustangs have been located that were painted your car’s color. As the database grows, these statistics are updated in real time. The Mustang Production Guides afforded the reader a snapshot of published data at the time the books were printed. The website instantly adds new entries into the statistics. Together as a community, we can watch the growth of Mustangs found.
During the ’65-’73 time frame, just short of three million Mustangs were produced. As of this writing, more than 63,000 Mustangs have been entered in the In Search of Mustangs database. That represents two percent of Mustang sales. A common question I’m asked is, “How many Mustangs have survived?” While I don’t know the number, statistics from R.L Polk Company tell us that once a car is 40 years old, only about 13 percent are still left. I have to believe it’s much higher with the Mustang.
While not proof, I’ll offer an example. The Boss 302 Registry (www.boss302.com) has registered 3,651 out of 8,042 Boss 302s built. That’s more than 45 percent. Admittedly, a Boss 302 has a better chance of survival than a six-cylinder coupe. But the preservation spirit for Mustangs began quite early. Before the last ’73 Mustang rolled off the assembly line, there were already Mustang stores selling parts, and parts that weren’t available from Ford were being reproduced shortly thereafter.
Numerous other features have been built into this website. If you’ve ever owned a particular Mustang and you have something connected with that car (e.g., a buildsheet, owner’s manual, or a photo of when the car was young), you can post it on the site. Any other owner of that car can do the same, and a history will be built of that car. Past, present, and future owners will be able to connect. Think of all the history that will eventually be deposited here for all to see — sort of a Mustang Facebook.
An enhancement of this web version of In Search of Mustangs is that all Mustangs are included in this search, not just the first-generation models. With nine million Mustangs produced by Ford, the work of In Search of Mustangs has expanded greatly. Come be part of the community at www.insearchofmustangs.org.
Originally published in Issue 14 of Mustang Magazine. Re-published here with permission.