These 6 cars changed the game for Ford's Mustang

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For 2021, Ford is now rolling out the all-electric Mustang Mach-E .

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We know it’s going to spark a million arguments over whether a Mustang Mach-E actually is a Mustang, or a horrendous hijack of the storied name , and so we’re not going to touch that one for now.

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These 6 cars changed the game for Ford's Mustang Back to video

That means we’re also not wading into whether it’s going to be a game-changer for Mustang — but whether it is or not, there have been a number of shakeups on this pony car over the years, and we’ve rounded up a corral of them here.

Carroll Shelby’s 1965 GT350

The Mustang was unveiled on April 17, 1964, and in its first year, you could get it with an inline-six, or with V8 engines that went as high as 271 horsepower. But Ford’s marketers thought there should be even more for enthusiasts and so they went to Carroll Shelby, who put his indelible stamp on the car.

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By the first day of January 1965, Shelby had built the 100 copies of the GT350 needed to qualify it for racing. It was rated at 306 horsepower; you bought the street version from Ford dealers, and the flat-out track car directly from Shelby.

Not many were made, but Shelby proved that with some massaging, the Mustang really could live up to its looks. In 1966, he produced the first supercharged Mustang, offering an optional (and very expensive) Paxton supercharger. Ford didn’t add a belt-driven huffer at the factory until 2003.

1966 Shelby GT350H

This was more about changing the sales game, because the “H” stood for Hertz. Ford got Shelby to contract with Hertz, the rental car company, to put around 1,000 copies of the car on its fleet. Hertz had briefly built its own cars back in the 1920s and they were black with gold stripes, so most of the GT350H cars were also.

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You had to be at least 25 years old to rent one, and you paid $17 a day and 17 cents a mile. Most were automatics, and to get one of the few manual transmissions, you first had to prove you could properly drive a stick.

No one knows how many Mustang sales could be directly attributed to the program, which was dubbed “Rent-a-Racer,” but making them available and getting them on the road (and, it’s rumored, a few on the track) certainly raised the new car’s profile to the public.

1974 Mustang II

The downsized Mustang II doesn’t resonate with many enthusiasts today, but Ford sold some 386,000 of them in its first year – almost three times what the bigger 1973 models moved – at least after it stopped loading showroom models up with expensive options, and started advertising it as an economical car. The II’s timing couldn’t have been better: A recent oil embargo sent gas prices soaring and some U.S. stations even ran out of it, and drivers were rapidly switching over to smaller cars with fuel-efficient engines.

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It was the first Mustang with a four-cylinder, the first Mustang without an available V8, and the first Ford in North America with a V6, rather than an inline-six. It was the first Mustang with rack-and-pinion steering. Perhaps most importantly, as big, thirsty muscle cars fell off the sales charts in the wake of fuel prices, the little Mustang II likely saved the nameplate from the scrap heap and kept it going.

1984 Mustang SVO

The SVO, which stood for Special Vehicle Operations, showed what Ford could do when it wanted to stick in some extra mojo. It wasn’t the first Mustang with a turbocharged four-cylinder – that happened in 1979 – but SVO added an intercooler that boosted horsepower from 142 to 175 ponies, and gave it more low-end torque.

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Other features included a five-speed Borg-Warner transmission, front and rear anti-roll bars, four-wheel disc brakes, revised steering rack, beefier bushings, and variable shocks. The grille was unique to it, as was its steering wheel and rear spoiler. The SVO proved that Ford could do some pretty spectacular stuff in-house, and while higher-performance, small-displacement turbo engines took a while to catch on overall, they continue today at Ford under the EcoBoost name.

1999 Mustang SVT Cobra

The Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) team was overwhelmed with work in the 1990s, so Ford had it focus on racing, while the new Special Vehicle Team (SVT) concentrated on consumer cars. Its first projects were the 1993 SVT Mustang Cobra and SVT F-150 Lightning pickup truck.

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For 1999, the SVT Cobra’s 4.6L V8 got a power boost from 305 to 320 horsepower. But the big news was at the rear, where the Cobra carried Mustang’s first independent rear suspension. The genius of it was that nothing else had to be changed — the engineers simply took out the solid axle, and bolted the new rear end into the same mounting points.

It improved handling, gave more suspension travel, and reduced unsprung weight. The Mustang lineup wouldn’t get independent rear suspension across-the-board until 2015.

2005 Mustang

The Mustang had been through a lot. It had grown big and then downsized into the Mustang II, it had been plunked onto a Fairmont platform to create the Fox body, it had been a hatchback — just about everything short of four doors. But then the designers thought it should go back to its roots.

I was at the Detroit Auto Show when the 2005 version came out onto the stage, and out loud I said, “Holy fudge-nuts, they got it right.” It wasn’t the original, but had that same blocky styling, that planted stance, and those big round headlights, all updated to perfection.

From now on, the Bullitt and the Boss and the Shelby aesthetics would look as they should on it again, and before long, the Camaro and Challenger had returned from hiatus to do battle with it again. And that’s something that really changed the game again, and it was Mustang that brought it all back.