SIA Flashback – 1955 Thunderbird vs. 1955 Mustang: The Story of a Bird and a Horse

Mustangs have invited comparisons with all sorts of cars, if only because all sorts of cars tried to copy the runaway success of the pony car or competed in the same category and for the same youth market: Camaro, Challenger, Barracuda, Corvair, etc. Comparing the first-generation Mustang to the first-generation Thunderbird at first seems laughable – different customer demographics, different decades, different number of seats – but as Arch Brown wrote in his comparison of the two in SIA #145, January 1995, both were sporting but not quite sports cars, and both proved successes for Ford in their own way.