S4E10: Celebrating the Spirit of the Open Road: The Ford Mustang Turns 60

Transcript:

SPEAKERS
Ted Ryan, Jason Dressel

Jason Dressel 00:12
Today on the History Factory podcast, the 60th anniversary of the Ford Mustang. I’m Jason Dressel, and welcome to the History Factory Podcast, the podcast at the intersection of business and history. Our friend Ted Ryan archives and heritage brand manager for the Ford Motor Company, is back to talk about the Ford Mustang. Ted and the folks at Ford have been doing all kinds of activations this year to celebrate the Mustang’s 60th anniversary. On this episode, Ted will share some of the untold stories, milestones and the enduring legacy of the Mustang. So buckle up and get ready for a ride through six decades of an American classic. Ted. Ryan, welcome back to the History Factory podcast. Great to have you on.

Ted Ryan 01:04
Thanks for having me. We got a fun topic today, one that I feel deeply Yes

Jason Dressel 01:09
indeed. And so happy anniversary to the iconic Ford Mustang. And I guess depending on you know when you became familiar with the Mustang brand, that feels maybe like the car’s been around forever, or maybe 60 years, is feeling like it’s been quite some time. But maybe, let’s start with, you know what? What is the origin story of the Mustang? You know? How did it come to be and why did, why did Ford create it?

Ted Ryan 01:39
It has a fascinating origin story, because it was born out of the ashes of the Edsel. People that know automotive history, even casually, have all heard the name Edsel, which, at the time, was the worst auto launch ever, and it was being done by Ford Motor Company. And Edsel was the wrong car for the wrong time, for the wrong generation, and our designers and our marketing people asked the wrong questions, which led them to build the wrong car, and it famously failed. Well after that, Ford revamped the way that it built cars and was built cars for the future and identified markets. And in the case of the Mustang, the very first marketing report actually has pictures of two crying babies, one on the top corner of the screen, one on the bottom corner of the screen, and it shows the demographic age of what we now call the baby boomers. They weren’t called that yet, all coming of age at the same time. And identify there was going to be a new cohort would be the words that the geographers and would call it. So a core a cohort was going to come of age, and it was going to be a young cohort, and it had a couple of characteristics that are identified in these amazing marketing reports. They’re going to be more college-educated because of the GI Bill. They’re going to be more two-income families because more women are entering the workforce, there are going to be more to car household families. It seems so strange to us here in 2024 but in 1960 there were only 5 million American families that had two cars. By 1965 that number was projected to be 13 million. So they anticipated 8 million new vehicles being sold as this younger generation got second cars, and women needed them because they’re in the workforce. And the design documents and the origin documents and the marketing documents, all told, Ford and the other OEMs, we weren’t, you know, alone on the hill with this, that there was a new generation coming. What was brilliant was that Lee Iacocca used test vehicles. He used the Mustang one, the Mustang two, the Allegra, a number of different test vehicles to test his concept, his idea that this new generation wanted something small and sporty. And if you look at the Mustang, it’s it’s a two door, and it’s small and it is sporty. And they also guessed correctly that it would should be something that had felt more European in design, because think about it simultaneously. You’ve got the imports from England, you’ve got the MGS and the Spitfires and the other vehicles, and then from Germany, the beetle coming so you’ve got these new and different cars coming in from Europe. So long story short, actually, that was long story long. They built a car, you know, prototyped a car that was sleek, evolutionary, sporty and cheap. We based a lot of it on the Falcon, which was a very inexpensive car. There were interchangeability of parts, so that the original sale price of the Mustang was 2368 FOB, Detroit. So that meant an inflation calculator. That’s about a 20. $1,000 car so new college graduates could buy it, you know, so and there was a famous study where they brought in 52 families to look at the car. I love how it was 52 not 50 and they showed and almost the preponderance of the family said, No, it’s there’s only two doors. It’s hard to get the kids in and out until they told them to price. And magically, almost all 52 of them found a reason why they could justify getting a Mustang, even though it wasn’t the perfect family car, because it looks so darn cool and it was a cheap car. So confluence of events, you get a fantastic design car for a generation. I’ve used the line before. I used it on Jim Farley’s podcast, that that that generation wanted its own music, and it got the Beatles and The stones. It wanted its own fashion, and you got long hair and bell bottoms, and they wanted their own car, and they got the Mustang. It was the car for a generation, yeah.

Jason Dressel 05:57
And it’s interesting the point you make about that point of entry the market, the price point, it really was in line with Ford’s legacy, right, of making cars affordable to the masses. I mean, that’s very in line with, obviously, the Model T, the model a correct me, if I’m wrong on any of that, but…

Ted Ryan 06:19
100% correct our new Maverick truck, and tried at 1999 you know, right? Messes.

Jason Dressel 06:22
Right, exactly. So, you mentioned, we, I Coco, of course. You know, what legendary auto executive? Are there some other interesting sort of stories or kind of characters behind the scenes that were kind of driving the, you know, the vision for the product?

Ted Ryan 06:40
There are a number, you know, and it’s funny too, because I don’t typically give credit to a individual like his chief of staff was a guy named Don Frye. That was one of the real drivers behind it, Henry Ford. The second was the driver behind it. Henry Ford, the second wanted an inexpensive car that everybody could get into, and there were differences of opinion between Henry the second and Iacocca. Henry was leaning more towards a German import that was called the Cardinal. That was going to be Ford’s first front wheel drive. And it was released in Germany and called the Tanis, and became a big hit in Germany, almost the same as unless I did here. And then the designers, Gail Halderman, had a big role in it. It’s interesting too. There’s a fun there’s a day that you can, you can put a stake in the ground. And it was August the 12th, 1962 where they had 12 different designs of different proposed vehicles. It was called the special Falcon project. And if you really want to wow people, you at cocktail parties, you can tell them, It’s the t5 was the the Mustang code name. It was either the special Falcon or the t5 and so they had a they had entries from the Lincoln Design Studio, the Special Vehicles design studio, and two entries from the Ford design studio and the Ford design studio. The driver side door was what became the eventual Mustang. The passenger door is completely different. That’s the beautiful thing about clay. When you make a clay model, you can make each side of the car different. So they picked the driver’s side door. We actually had the verbatim notes from the discussions that day, and it was fairly unanimous that that was the vehicle that they were going to choose. So do, if you do the the timeline, that’s, that’s 1962 and it, you know, it takes three years, typically, to get a car out and on the market. So they quickly took that design, figured out how they could build it affordably, and then went forward from there.

Jason Dressel 08:37
So the Mustang, it’s celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. Where does that fall in terms of longevity of Ford models?

Ted Ryan 08:45
It’s up there. But the F series is 1948 so I don’t know that they’ll ever catch that just but by way of comparison, Model T, probably one of the most successful cars ever done, had a 1908 1927 time span. So, you know, there were, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of vehicles that had been around. The Fiesta was around, particularly in Europe, for 2530 years. But 60 is a long running nameplate, and to essentially keep the same spirit in the car, obviously it doesn’t look the same. It became more muscular. It became the muscle car. It got longer for a while. It got shorter for a while. But it has that same spirit of the open road that you see in the in the Mustang today, that you would have seen at the very beginning. The other thing, and it’s fascinating to me, is at the beginning, or from the beginning, it’s been a car advertised to women. In fact, out of the first million vehicles, about 43 45% were sold to women. I talked about the two income families. Now, in fact, if you if there’s any TV nerds out there, go watch the opening scene of the Mary Tyler Moore Show when she gets out of the car and. Throws the hat in the air. She’s getting out of the Mustang, because that was a car that was appealing and expensive and sporty and stylish. And it, you know, it in many ways, it fit the same way that you would wear a Rolex to show you. Know, prestige and this enable you. You drove a Mustang because you’re sporty and stylish and new and young, and it was a perfect car for that generation,

Jason Dressel 10:27
What would have been some of the most popular models, either from a design perspective, or from a from a sales standpoint, what have been some of the most popular and Mustangs over the run. And I guess connected to that, because I guess there’s not an addition that comes out every year. How many different versions of the Mustang Have there been?

Ted Ryan 10:47
There been seven generations in the auto world. We call them generations. So the first generation was essentially 1964 to 1974 and then the second generation was the Mustang two, which was an interesting one, because it was a direct response to the oil crisis. They you know, it was a smaller car, and it was more fuel efficient. It didn’t have as big an engine, but that wasn’t what was selling at the time. And then the Fox Body, I’m skipping a couple of generations. The other one is the generation that went from 2004 until 2023 we just changed it a year ago. Incredibly popular. That’s what most people think of when they think modern Mustangs. It had the, you know, the it was a line that one of the designers used at the time. It was like, it should look fast, standing still, and the Mustang looked ferocious in the way, and the newest one has substantial changes on the back, but mostly the new generation is all digital, and there’s some amazing capabilities that they could build into the digital nature for the 60th edition one. I know that’s a question for later, but I’ll throw out one nugget now you can actually change your digital dashboard. So if you want to go back and do a fox body dashboard, that’s one of the selections that you can do down the road. So you can have a retro dashboard on your brand new, incredibly functional and, you know, and vibrant. 2,024/50 or 60th anniversary Mustang. So the the main thing about each one of these generations is they all stay true, even the much maligned Mustang too, they all stay true to what the spirit of the Mustang was. You know, the it’s a car that you’re supposed to get on open road and feel like you can go anywhere and put the windows down and put your music up and, and, and, and be free as a car. That meant freedom from the very beginning. And each one of those generations carries that carries that on. I’m not a fan of the 90s ones. I’m like, oh, okay, it’s a Mustang, but is it really?

Jason Dressel 12:55

Have they always had, and they’ve always had convertibles, right?

Ted Ryan 13:06

Almost always. There were a couple years they didn’t, but almost every model years has had a convertible, which is, once again, that’s a trait of the Mustang. What’s,

Jason Dressel 13:07
what’s one of your favorite Well, what’s your favorite generation? What’s one of your favorite generation?

Ted Ryan 13:11
If I, if you gave me money right now, to go buy a first, to buy a Mustang, I’m going to go buy, well, I have a current generation one, but you know, if I’m going to go buy a Mustang, it’s going to be the first generation. And I kind of, I’m different. I don’t, you know, Carol Shelby famously called it a secretary’s car. Well, you know, that’s why it appealed. It appealed to women. You know what’s so I would not worry about getting the v8 with all the bells and whistles, or the Shelby GT 350 Oh, that’s a beautiful car too. I kind of like the first generation, first couple of years. And just give me a straight six cylinder and the three speed automatic transmission, and I could be quite happy.

Jason Dressel 13:52
What is the is the first generation. I assume it’s the most popular, the most the most rare.

Ted Ryan 13:58
It’s not the most rare, because they built so many of them. Because if you think about in real terms, so there have been just under 11 million Mustangs sold, where there were 2 million sold in the first five years. So you know, in the intervening 55 years, they built 9 million more. So it is not the the most rare by any stretch of the imagination, the box Fox bodies are the ones, uh, gosh, I wish I had something I could illustrate it for you. Basically think kind of boxy 80s Mustang. And that was, what was the fox body. It was also the one that the California Special control one was. So if you saw episodes of chip sometimes they were, those were the So who is it? Vanilla Ice five, 5.0 that’s Foxbody. And so those are the ones that they capture the imagination, and probably they’re more valuable than the first gens. I just talked to a guy that bought a first generation, and he paid $18,000 for first generation. So. Uh six uh, cylinder, three speed. So they’re collectible. Now, the ones that you can’t afford, or I can’t afford, are the Shelby’s, Shelby GT 350 Shelby GT 500 Shelby, King of the Road those. But those were built in Michigan and shipped to Carroll Shelby’s workshop in California, where special modifications were made to them, and suddenly they’re getting 429 engines plopped into them. And you know, the horsepower is going up. And one of those sold recently, I think, for 1.6 million. Wow. My favorite Shelby GT story is Jim Morrison from the doors. Many people don’t know it, but the only car he ever owned in his life was a Shelby GT 350 and he called it the Blue Lady. It was obviously painted blue. Enterprising people can go Google and you’ll see that he made home movies about in the in the in the desert, and he actually published images of it. It’s missing. It’s one of the missing unicorns out there that, if we could ever find that car? Whoever finds that car is going to be able to sell it for quite a bit of money.

Jason Dressel 16:05
Yeah, wow, yeah. And it’s interesting. Your your point about the the for the fox body from the is as a generation Xer, I can appreciate, I remember definitely that era where the cop cars were Mustangs. I was definitely, as a little guy, a huge fan of the show chips and and then, as I got a little bit older, I remember, you’re bringing me back with some nostalgia here Ted. I remember the five, the five, the five of the Mustang 5o were a big deal.

Ted Ryan 16:32
They were a huge deal, and they still are. And then ice did a song about them. And, you know, the for each one of the Mustangs, I found a pop culture connection in one way, shape or form. My favorite Mustang two, one is Farrah Fawcett as Charlie’s Angel sitting on the hood of a Mustang. Two, it was the car that she drove and that show for a period of time with the must with the Mach. One, you’ve got James Bond on two wheels going through Vegas the very first movie instance of a Mustang ever was in the movie Goldfinger, where the broccoli family that produced the the movie series were friends with Henry the second and got him to have one shipped over to England. So just a few months after the launch, they’re filming with the Mustang and the Swiss Alps and the Goldfinger movie so is that I totaled it up one time has had more than 8000 movie or video appearances over time. Wow. Actually built a playlist, which I can share with you, a YouTube playlist, or every single video features a Mustang, and the Mustang is germane to the video in one way, shape or form, and those videos have been seen over 15 billion times. Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, we found a Japanese k pop band. They used to Mustang in their video in Tokyo. You know, the Fast and Furious closing with a Mustang. So it’s an amazing view. It’s an amazing car that became a part of and shaped pop culture in a way that few cars do.

Jason Dressel 18:09
Yeah, that was a question I wanted to ask you, which was, it’s such a it’s such an emblematic symbol of American car culture and American in general. What is the popularity of the Mustang internationally? I would expect it’s pretty high.

Ted Ryan 18:29
It is pretty high. It’s been the best selling sports coupe internationally for the past decade. We’re talking the newer editions. But I was in Australia last March, and I was there for Formula One. And they actually had a meet up at the Mustang Collectors Club over there. And there were 100 Mustangs in a row, you know, gen one, gen two, Foxbody. So it’s there’s meetups around the world this year for the 60th anniversary. And this is a really, actually interesting tieback. Jason is on the anniversary day, which was April the 17th, we actually invited clubs around the world to meet up and then send photos and to Ford and we would help publicize their meetups. And our estimate was that there were over 10,000 people that brought their Mustangs to group settings around the world, because people that identify as a Mustang owner, they have a passion for it. I was at fabulous Fords in Los Angeles on the 17th for the anniversary, and they had 1200 Mustangs on site at fabulous Fords at the Irwindale raceway. It was just amazing to see this row after row after row of Mustangs.

Jason Dressel 19:38
So what So, so that’s a good, good segue. What else is? What else do you guys doing? For, for the 60th for, for the Mustang?

Ted Ryan 19:46
A lot. We’re doing a lot because, and you got to be careful when you have a brand like Mustang, because you don’t want it can’t look old. It can’t feel nostalgic. The word I use is retro. It has to be a. Metro feel if you do something with Mustang. So some of the things that they’ve got planned for this year is the 60th anniversary package. Once again, it’s a five oh liter engine. We went back with. There’s a bunch of easter eggs to that. We included every engine type. So when you open the hood, we have every engine that every that has ever appeared in the Mustang listed to the 289, the 429 the five, oh leader. There’s unique dash plaques and exterior features like I mentioned before. You can customize your instrument panel. And we did a special Fox Body one, and we did a first generation one. There’s exclusive graphics that can be iconic silver. I’m reading some of these. Jason, so I don’t screw them up. Or bamille, yeah, both of which were classic Mustang colors, smoke housing of the standard Mustang night pony. And we painted a limited number of them, a couple still for sale. So if anybody hears this, the historic Brittany blue, in addition to the more traditional Wimbledon white race red and vapor blue. And it’s interesting, as the archivist for the company, so we had the Mustang team in about two years ago. We had every single color that every Mustang had ever been out on the table, and then we also had charts showing how popular each color had been by year, by decade and overall. And probably not too surprisingly, red, white and blue have always been the most popular colors, but Black is up there as well, which was the one that surprised me. So the four, those four colors comprise basically probably 70% of all the Mustangs that have been sold over the years. And they’re doing another they’re doing a second digital cluster that’s going to come out the second part of this year. It’s going to be the Mustang SDT special vehicle. Can’t remember what the t stands but it’s, once again, it’s going to be a different digital cluster on the gages. Couple of other facts and figures from this. Mustang has been the best selling sports coupe in the world for the last 10 years, best selling American sports coupe for a decade, and we’ve sold more than 10 million in the 60 years. So that pales in comparison to the F series, where we’ll sell a million pickup trucks in a year. But Mustangs are different, and the reason why must you don’t try to sell a million Mustangs in a year, because it’s got this era of specialness about it that makes it stand apart.

Jason Dressel 22:38
Yeah, what? So given the success that that the car has had in the it’s kind of enduring, sort of, you know, principles that you you’ve talked about was, was there ever a time when the continuity of the brand and the car were in question, or were there any chapters where there were some specific challenges from either sales or product perspective?

Ted Ryan 23:03
Countless times, the Mustang is was almost killed several times. Have you ever heard of the Ford Probe, which was an example front wheel drive vehicle? Probe, one, probe two. The Ford Probe was the Mustang was almost rebranded as the Ford Probe and became a two was going to become a two seater front wheel drive vehicle. And thankfully, somebody with half their brain stepped in and said, No, no, we’ve got to keep Mustang and just figure out how to make it better. This is in that, that period of the 90s where they couldn’t quite decide what they wanted to be. So instead, they went back to the roots and they redesigned the Mustang with more of a feel for what the Mustang should have been. So it came within an eyelash of going away at that time. And we Ford developed the Ford Probe, and which bombed, obviously didn’t bomb, it just didn’t do great. And so had the Mustang been rebranded as the probe, it would have been gone. But then the the redesign in 2004 resurrected the vehicle because it took on so much more of its the Mustang spirit and the design and the ferocity and the noise and the power all the same time it was saved. I don’t want to bore people with technology, but it was saved in part because of the echo boost engine, which basically is a miniature version of a turbocharged engine, so that you can have a four cylinder engine produce the same horsepower as a six or an eight, that’s your 32nd cap. So we could put a supercharged or an echo boost before in there, and it could still draw 300 horsepower, so it still had the power that you wanted, but it reduced on the cost, and it reduced on the call, you know, the ultimate cost of the vehicle. So it was once again affordable, back to its roots again, so that oh four Mustang set it up for the success that it still continues to. Where you see it growing on that. And I don’t ever speak about competitors, but our competitors have left the market. The Chargers gone, and the Camaro is gone. And so if you want a sports coupe, American sports coupe, the Mustang is that’s your cup of tea. Now it’s and and the designers that work on it are cognizant of that, and worked really hard to to make it a car that everybody’s going to want, and to get crossover traffic.

Jason Dressel 25:27
Well, and it’s interesting too, from a brand perspective, because of the continuity of it. I mean, you know, I It’s always interesting when brands make those returns. Obviously, Ford’s done that with, you know, brands like the Thunderbird and those two carbs you mentioned, you know, the Camaro, the charger, both, you know, were brought back at one point. So inevitably, if the if the Mustang has ever discontinued, the the long term bet would be that it will still come back and be revived. But certainly it sounds it’s not it’s not going away anytime soon.

Ted Ryan 26:02
There are two huge fans of the Mustang. One is named Bill Ford, and he’s the chairman of the board, and the other is Jim Farley, and he’s the CEO. One of the first car that Jim Farley ever restored was a Mustang. He restored a Mustang and drove across country as a teenager. And as a passion for Mustang, he has a passion for electric vehicles as well. But he has a true and then Bill Ford, I I have access to his collection of vehicles, and I can tell you that Mustang is very, very, very well represented in his collection.

Jason Dressel 26:32
How many now do you have? How many do Mustangs in the archives?

Ted Ryan 26:36
We have in the Ford Performance archive, which we are adjacent to, and we advise with they have a number of Mustangs in their collection. So in my in the Archives collection, we don’t, because we don’t need them, because performance hasn’t there’s no point in getting what they have. But, but we don’t have the first, the very first Vin bin number one is on display at the Henry Ford Museum, and the very first one ever sold, ironically, was sold to I spoke about sales of women, was sold to a young female teacher in Chicago, and she still owns it. It’s a blue convertible. She fell in love with it, and she and her dad convinced the salesperson to sell it to them two days early. So she took possession of hers on april 15, instead of April 17, when the rest of the world could get them. So a couple of interesting ones.

Jason Dressel 27:28
That’s a great little little nugget. Yeah. So, so before, I want to ask you about some other stuff going on with with for the archives. But so what? What are some of your What are one or two of your favorite Mustang stories

Ted Ryan 27:41
It’s only I probably have a recency bias, but I’ve done so much work this year on the Ford World’s Fair pavilion. Ford hired Disney’s amazing Imagineers to build our world’s fair pavilion, and it was open for two years. More than 15 million people did it visited 72 million visited the World’s Fair in general. And Henry Ford, the second, wanted you to ride in a car instead of getting in a boat. Like, it’s a small world, it’s a small world. Was done for Disney, for Pepsi, but you got in a boat. What the hell does that have to do with Pepsi? So Henry Ford is like, if we’re going to do this ride, you got to get in a car. So there were 144 cars, and they traveled along this path, a 12 minute journey. And 24 of those cars the first two years were Mustangs. And out of those first 24 there’s only four known to exist. And we located two of them. I brought one of them to Walt Disney World for the for their big D 23 event, and we did a panel discussion that Kevin freige and John Favreau were on us cool, standing on stage with freige and Favreau and Leonard Maltin and Peter doctor, who’s head of Pixar entertainment. So we were all talking about the World’s Fair, and my job is to talk about Ford’s role with Disney and bringing it together. And then very recently, at Woodward Dream Cruise, we got the fourth Mustang ever built. Was one that was dedicated for the fair. There’s a midnight black one, and we had that on display. So it’s just amazing that, well, a that Iacocca and the marketing team were so smart to put these cars there and to get them, you know, get them there. We recently filmed with Jay Leno as well, in Leno’s Garage about the Skyway Mustang. And he actually rode in the car that I had out there. He had pictures of himself and his dad going to the World’s Fair, and it was a Mustang. And it, you know, there. So that fair and the Mustang intro. The other thing they did that was fascinating is they advertised on all three television stations at the same time, nine o’clock on the 17th the day before the day the car came out. They did Mustang ad so that the everybody watching TV that night saw the Mustang. They flooded the newspapers and magazines. Scenes. It was awarded the Tiffany design excellent. It was one of the most brilliantly executed launches of a vehicle, and frankly, it changed the way that cars were launched. It was launched at the World’s Fair, instead of at the Detroit Auto Show or the New York Auto Show, where somebody pulled a drape off of a car and said, Here it is. And he had 100 reporters around it. No, we did it at the World’s Fair, and 15 actually, we estimated that 40,000 people drove in each one of those Mustangs and but 15 million people saw them in person. So what an amazing introduction. It was just different from from anything else that had been done at that time.

Jason Dressel 30:36
Brilliant, brilliant.

Ted Ryan 30:41
It’s kismet, it it’s a car, perfect car, perfect time, perfect place, perfect introduction to create a ground swell. And I always, always use the Beatles as the only comparison that I can think of. You know, they hit the right music, the right time, the right clothing, the right fashion, to instantly change music. Well, this car changed the automobile industry, and the course of a week.

Jason Dressel 31:02
And it was the same year, right? It wasn’t the British in 1964?

Ted Ryan 31:07
Yep, same year, and it was on both Time and Newsweek, the cover of Time and Newsweek, it just, it was a phenomena, and that doesn’t happen very often. I don’t think it could happen in today’s fractured social media world, where you get your news looking at a bone so, but right time and place it could.

Jason Dressel 31:22
Yeah, exactly. It’s so much harder to like, really own, own the media landscape the way, obviously, you used to be able to So Ted, the last time we talked, you guys had just launched, I think, the Ford Heritage Vault, and that thing has just been a juggernaut. What What else is? What else is going on with the heritage vault? I guess, specifically, in any, any other cool projects that you’re working on, other than, other than the Mustang.

Ted Ryan 31:52
Let me give the heritage vault. I just asked for the stats today. So the heritage vault, for those who haven’t heard about it. We are, gosh, just over two years ago, made this public website, Ford heritage vault, com, and we have put we’re trying to get samples of every vehicle that Ford has ever built, from 1903 to 2003 and then we expanded content from there where we started with 5000 assets. The first year it was so popular, it kept crashing. It’s still incredibly popular. Since then, we’ve added images from England, Australia, Germany, around the world. We’ve added more than 500 issues of the Ford Times magazine. We’ve added location photography for our buildings in Europe and in the US and the most recent stats, since the launch on June 16, 22 until August 31 2024 there have been more than 30,159,000 searches, and there’s been 7,778,000 downloads. It’s just staggering. When we when we built it, we had no idea it was gonna be that popular. We average more than 1.2 million searches per month in this site. There’s only 16,000 things. It’s incredible. It’s just incredible. I had a journalist send me a note the other day, and I’ve been doing this for 33 years. 32 years, I’ve never had a journalist I know like this. He thanked me for the vault because it made his job so much easier, and he found so many topics that he could write about that he didn’t even know existed so and a big part of that came because we added the content of the Ford times. The four times was a magazine. It was a monthly magazine. It was a lifestyle magazine, not a Ford magazine at all. In fact, many issues didn’t mention Ford at all it was. But I mentioned, if you were taking a road trip through the down the Pacific Coast Highway, you know, in all the pictures would have a Mustang or, you know, a fair lane or whatever kind of car in it. But it had lifestyle stories where to stay, you know, etc, and that the circulation for that magazine was actually bigger than the Reader’s Digest for a period of time, and had a circulation of almost 5 million issues per month. And so we’ve digitized and put those on line, and I just in this month’s most recent stats, seven of the top 10 searches are concerning the four times, but that’s where the content is. That’s where, you know, I’m envisioning the students out there writing papers or journalists writing stories or finding stories. There’s one I just I did a search. I don’t know what made me do it. I typed in the Masters, the golf tournament and some of a gun. If we hadn’t done three different stories on the Masters during the nearly 60 year run of the magazine, and nothing to do with Ford. But one of them was written by Obi Keeler, the great Bobby Jones biographer. One of them had a detailed map of the course layout showing how changes. There’s great and rich content in there. That is one of those, if you build it, they will come, and people are coming and. I can’t tell you what we’re doing next year, but we actually had a planning meeting this morning, and it’s going to be exciting. And we’re going to continue to give journalists, enthusiasts, students, the the content or access to content that they couldn’t get otherwise. And the other thing I forgot to mention or but I mentioned now, everything’s free. Everything is downloadable. There’s a disclaimer saying, Please don’t put it on a coffee cup and sell it. But essentially, you can download a three to five megabyte image of nearly if you want a beauty shot of the Mustang, you can get it there, particularly in April. Mustang obviously was the most popular search, but we found that the most popular things downloaded were the brochures people were going back in, and they were finding brochures of their five liter Mustang and looking to see what the color options were and what the fabric options were. So we’re providing content that and that people that love Ford or people that love their cars want access to. And you know, as far as I know, we’re the only American OEM to do it. Mercedes does it. I can’t, you know, and Porsche doesn’t do it, per se. Mercedes is probably the most apropos. But we’re going to continue to add content and make the vault bigger and better. I can see, in five years and 10 years, there’ll be 50,000 things, and we’ll, you know, nearly every image of every Ford car will be in there. That’s our goal. I can’t tell you how excited we just got a bunch of brochures from Australia, and like, 300 so the team was, ah, great. Here’s 300 more brochures for the vault. We’ll get them in there, and then suddenly people around the world will be able to find the content that’s local to them. One of them that stunned me recently was the country that did the most searching in the vault was he was Poland or Croatia, which made me worried that somebody’s downloading images and putting them on T shirts. But, you know, hopefully it’s Ford fans out there who are who are looking for images before a meetup.

Jason Dressel 36:59
So Ford heritage vault.com What are some other communities or resources that our listeners who are into car history and Ford may want to know about?

Ted Ryan 37:11
We just launched a new blog which the URL is cumbersome, but if you type Ford heritage vault blog. It will take you to our media site, which is basically media.ford.com actually, that’s not too hard. Media.ford.com and click on the heritage button. My team has written a series. I think we’re up to like 35 or 40 essays now. Just short, 250 to 700 word essays. I just did one recently on the introduction of the Mustang. Did one on the Lincoln Continental. And those are illustrated with images from the vault and will lead you back, but also give you the fuller story. There are big plans in the second half of this year, early next year, to really make that say, come to life.

Jason Dressel 38:03
Awesome. Love it. So any, so in any, any remaining events between now and the end of the year on the

Ted Ryan 38:09
Mustang, for the Mustang, not too many more events. There’s, like I mentioned, a special edition digital dashboard that’s coming. And I can’t I can only hint to look for some news that will be happening in Charlotte that will, for the Mustang purist, it will be like the Garden of Eden. You’re going to enjoy it. But I can’t, can’t spill the beans yet, because I think it’s gonna be announced in mid September. But there’s gonna be something pretty cool happening with Mustang and and with Ford performance in the Charlotte area, my team has been working to build out some of the material for what they’re going to launch, and that’s going to be really cool. I I’ve been begging for my invite to get down there, but so far, it has not been forthcoming. You’ll, you’ll relate to this. That’s the problem is you work on the back end, on all these projects, and then you never get invited to go.

Jason Dressel 38:55
Yeah, exactly. We are, we are, we are backstage. Well, Ted, congratulations on all the great work. Happy, happy 60th to to the Mustang. And always, always awesome to talk to you. And thanks again, and we’ll talk soon.

Ted Ryan 39:10
Thanks much. Thanks for having me on this has been fun.

Jason Dressel 39:17
That wraps up this episode of the history factory podcast celebrating 60 years of the Ford Mustang. A huge thanks to Ted Ryan for sharing his insights. If you enjoyed this episode, you may want to go and give a listen to season two, Episode Seven, when Ted was last with us. Until next time. Thanks for listening to the history factory podcast. Be well, I’m Jason Dressel.