Ford is about to open a new chapter on the 58-year old Mustang story with the reveal of the 2024 Mustang this month. And you can bet it’ll be compared mercilessly to every one of the generations that preceded it to see how it ranks in the table of Mustang greats.
Even without yet knowing exactly what it looks like or what’s underneath the hood we can safely assume the newest car will be the best in numerous ways. It will be the safest, for a start, the most technically advanced, the most luxurious, and the most fuel efficient. Any new car that fails to be all of those things when compared with its predecessors isn’t ready to hit the market.
But comparing a new Mustang with an old one isn’t like comparing this year’s Nissan Kicks with last year’s. There’s a whole heap of emotional and cultural baggage wrapped up in the Mustang’s near-six-decades on the planet that persuades us to overlook some of the older cars’ weaknesses.
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We’ve all got our own personal favorites, but we want to hear about yours. Maybe it’s the car that started it all, the 1964.5 coupe (or convertible; the fastback came along a few months later), or the universally lusted-over 1968 fastback, as driven by Steve McQueen’s Frank Bullitt. It could be the Fox-body 5.0 you drove through high school, or the 2016 GT350 with its rev-crazed flat-plane crank V8 that you tell yourself you’re going to buy next year before the gas pumps are shut off forever.
And we’re pretty sure there are some of you out there that have a curious passion for the Mustangs that tend to get forgotten about: the six-cylinder cars, the Mustang IIs, the odd-looking ’71-73 coupes and the fourth-generation SN-95 cars from the mid-to-late 1990s, perhaps because your parents had one, or they were the first car you bought new.
There’s no right or wrong answer, unless you say Mach-E, because, come on, that doesn’t really count, does it? Or maybe it does. Leave a comment and let us know which is your favorite generation and model of Mustang, and throw in your least favorites while you’re at it.