Man: This is our design development department here, where basically the mustang's been designed since 50 years.

Not many people have access to this room so you're very privileged to see where magic is happening.

You can imagine every single designer in this building wants to be part of the story.

Man: The designers now can sketch on the computer, but I think that some of the creativity is lost.

I think a sculpture adds a lot of ideas that you don't do with a computer.

Man: That's one cost that's held through design.

We never left Clay models.

There's nothing like getting a three-dimensional product that you can take outside, put it in the sun, spin it around on a turntable, and look at it.

Man: You cannot evaluate just looking at a two-dimensional screen.

You gotta have to have the experience walking around the Clay and touching it and feeling it with your hands actually.

Man: All these lines, they have to know each other.

You can see right through the middle where you have the horizontal lines which are giving the length and strength to the car.

And then the haunches is ready to pounce as it dives down and actually points to the wheels.

So the entire power is right there where he's touching it.

Man: The designer puts emotion into a car.

He puts life into it.

This is what people are looking for.

This is what gets them excited.
It's that magic.

It's that ingredient x, the thing that turns it on, that gives it that spark that makes people say, "I've got to have that."

A car is really rolling art when you get right down to it.

Man: The very first mustang was designed in this room.

It's basically the spirit of mustang looking over every designer, so make sure that we don't screw up the next model.

Designing a good-looking car is absolutely easy as pie.

Designing a car that the company can afford, the manufacturing guys can assemble, the engineers can engineer, that's damn difficult.

Man: It's a creation just as art is a creation.

Each new car, you're going where no one's gone before, and you're talking about, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars.

Every day in the life of a program, you're living on the edge of the cliff.

Female reporter: Welcome back now to Detroit.

The fourth largest city in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy Thursday afternoon after struggling with an $18 billion debt.

Man: Everything is a huge risk.

We've had several brushes with death.

Those other companies didn't purposely go out of business, but it happens.

Every little detail can be a big, big decision.

In the end, the person who should be making those calls is the chief program engineer.

Man on telephone: I'm gonna show you the file here tracking all the way.

As the chief engineer, you're accountable for every success and every failure on this program.

Man on telephone: If I remember, it's like 71 pounds.

- 70 pounds heavier?
- Yes.

- Guys.
- Hau: It's a stand-and-deliver job.

I'm just saying the scope of the program does not align with what we're trying to do.

We're spending most of the money on this program is being spent for fuel economy, and yet we're adding 70 pounds of weight to the car.

That's like...that doesn't even make sense.

Mustang is...I always describe it as the vehicle that everyone in the company aspires to work on.

From the design team, to marketing, there are literally thousands of people in the company working on mustang.

Hau: At the end of the day, maybe only 30 of those people actually work for the chief engineer.

The nature of the job is you're accountable for everything, but you don't control directly any of the resources.

It really comes down to getting people who don't report to you to do what you need them to do.

It's the ultimate definition of being a leader.

Before we even talk weight buys, we better talk weight efficiency of all the actions that we're taking because we're not gonna throw more money in this car just to offset an inefficient addition to the program.

That we're not gonna do.

Art: You cannot settle for the wrong answer.

You cannot be second-best.

It's a very, very difficult job.

Do I feel pressure?

As chief engineer, you have a ton of pressure, but it's good and bad, right?

We have a huge responsibility to keep mustang going in the direction that it needs to go and yet at the same time never forgetting where we came from.

I do have decision-making tools.

We have an 8 ball, and this is a...the 8 ball that you'd find in any store.

This...actually, we refer to this a lot.

It has guided us along the way.

The other decision-making tools we have are persuasive tools like bats and hammers and things like that that we, you know, when we want something to make sure that they understand that we're being serious.

You spend 12 to 14 hours a day together.

If we can't have fun and if we can't sort of laugh about things every once in a while, then it's gonna get pretty boring and you're not gonna get the best out of people, so we try to keep it alive.

So yeah, we use some of these tools of decision-making.

Yeah.

Well, that's a good question.

We're still starting with initial sketches that the designers do.

I don't think that process has changed much since day one in cars.

Gale: From the sketch, they make a Clay model.

Then, we release that Clay to the engineers.

We need to engineer the car to work around the appearance first just trying to get the pieces to fit.

A thousand details that are behind every tiny, little thing you see, that is what makes a great car.

Every single part of the car is new, 2,000-plus parts that have to be designed, developed, tested, and assembled.

Like real textures, wheel covers...

- Door handles...
- Engines, wheel base...

- Rear view mirror.
- ...Plates....

Prakash: All those things have to be designed in that product.

And remember, you have to make these cars in their thousands.

Marcy: It's really complicated, making sure that we design the vehicle so that the people who have to put the car together can do it easily.

Edsel: If you said to me, "what's the most important thing your great-grandfather Henry Ford ever did?"

I would say to you the movie "assembly line."

That's what really took the car business from a cottage industry to what we are today.

There are tremendous changes being made in the technology.

What hasn't changed is the process.

What we call the job 1 day, it's really the finish line for the whole team and that's when the 2015 mustang launches.

Man: Job 1 is mass production.

It's really a culmination of how everything comes together.

Because as you can imagine, being a chief engineer, when you start shipping vehicles, that's probably the biggest moment of your career.

When the first set of customers get in the car, the goal that I set out several years ago will have been achieved.

But job 1 for us is...that's when the car's gonna start shipping out on trains and on car carriers, and they're gonna go to real people in people's driveways, and that's what job 1 really is.

Now that's the most expensive way to solve an issue.

What I wanna work through the next couple days is the more efficient way of solving the issue, right?

All right.

And chief made the night schedule last night before the director called, unless you changed your schedule.

- No, no, no, that's fine.
- The answer was open.

I have to pick up the kids tonight so I will be available,

I just have to get mobile at some point.

So anyway, I will join you for a little bit.

- You're coming to see me?
- For a few minutes.

Morning, morning, morning.
Don't give me that look.

Morning, everybody.

Man: So okay up in this a-pillar joint here.

- Yeah?
- There's an air leak.

Through here, there's a water leak and then we had the squeak up here at the top of the Cal-top to the a pillar.

- Other than that, this was the best joint we've ever designed.

You know, you guys are freaking all these people out with the cameras.

Seriously, they...they are, like, just beyond.

We're just gonna go for a walk.

I'll wait for you.

Are they down?

When did that happen?

Um, he said we had a part shortage.

The plant is down.
They're not producing today.

We don't have parts.

We can't build cars.
So it's a big deal.

If you think about it, not only do we have to pay the employees and they're not producing cars, but we're losing the production of those cars, which in this plant is, you know...mustangs alone, it's well over 300 cars that are being lost today plus the fusion.

And so that's...the numbers are huge.

So it's not something you like to see.

Hau: The auto business is a really asset-intensive business.

You can't build a car if you're missing one fastener, right?

It could be something as simple as a five-cent part.

To do a car program, you literally...you invest a billion dollars.

If you're not successful, you can lose money very quickly, and there's a lot of people's jobs at stake, you know, people's livelihoods.

And in an assembly plant, we employ, you know, 900 to 1,000 people on one shift, and that's just Ford.

If you think about the supply base, it's a multiplier of seven or so.

It's...you know, it's not something to be taken lightly.

Man: This is a tough business.

I mean, look, we're the first city to declare bankruptcy.

Um...

There's a lot of pressure on those guys because they have to get it right.

Dave: Well, I think that this car means a lot to the automotive industry and I think that it's a sense of pride for everybody in the Detroit area, you know?

Whether you're gm or Chrysler, it doesn't matter.

American car companies wanna see the American cars do well.

Hau: If you go down to downtown Detroit, you see the Joe Louis fist.

When we start the design process, we'll pick images, non-automotive related, to really provide the designers with the inspiration.

For the 2015 car, it was this fist punching through the air.

Man: My sketch has this very strong feature, a strong chin, I wanna call it.

It has like the very masculine face and eyes which are very fearless as well.

We really wanted that very strong look, not only conveying power, but very much a salt-of-the-earth, working, not trying to be something that it's not.

That was the imagery we wanted for the mustang, and it's very much a Detroit thing.

Art: You know, I think it's not just the car.

I think it's what the car represents.

It's that feeling that you can be what you want to be.

You can create yourself.

And that resonated the '60s, and it continues to resonate all around the world.

Growing up in Europe and having this little, small four-cylinder engines and you all of a sudden, see this American v8, which sounds amazing, like a lion.

I had posters I remember of the mustang on my wall.

Art: You can go to Thailand, and they know what a mustang is.

You can go to Russia.
They want a mustang.

As a kid who grew up overseas, the thing that stood out for me was seeing my first mustang when I was growing up in Vietnam, a 1970 super boss mustang.

It was part of an army promotional tour.

It symbolized everything that was special about America.

Living in Vietnam, that's what you envisioned.

The soldiers were big and strong, and this car just embodied those things.

Strength, power, freedom.

You envisioned this car running at high speeds in wide-open spaces, and that was a pretty powerful image as a kid to see.

You know, my aspirations living in Vietnam was to someday own a car.

That was a dream.

It was beyond my wildest dreams to think that you could come to not only live in the U.S., go through the public school system but then be in charge of this iconic product.

If you wanna call that the American dream, if that's not it, I don't know what is, you know?

When you're 16 years old, first sign of freedom is you go out, you get your driver's license, and you get a car, okay, and that's a freedom that stays with you until somebody says you can't drive anymore.

I think you either have a passion for driving or it's just a utilitarian thing that you got to do to get from point a to point b.

Wilson pickett: I've loved the mustang ever since I was a kid.

I had a fella on my street that owned a 1965 mustang fastback, fire-engine orange.

And if I even heard him start the car,

I had to run out there just to listen to it.

I'm driving a '68 coupe.

I own a 1990 saleen mustang.

1970 mach 1 mustang.

I actually have an album with pictures of all of my cars.

My '64 1/2.
My '68. '89 mustang gt.

Mustang is a subjective decision.

King cobra 1978.

If you're really logical, you would never buy a mustang.

I could show you lots more.

It's an emotional decision.

Everybody has a mustang story.

You don't have to own one to have one.

You know somebody that had a mustang.

You know a story.

Maybe it was that guy in high school.

Maybe it was your sister-in-law's cousin.

Who knows?

Thousands of people on five continents spend all of their time, money and energy supporting this car.

They've become a social network around mustang.

There's nothing like it.

My job is to have a connection with fans.

I'm basically the liaison between Ford motor company and all the clubs.

You don't have to get, like, a focus group, like, "who is the customer?"
It's me.

I'm dealing with my friends and me.

So communication isn't you're just yelling out

- your news to someone.

Hey listen, do you hear something?

It's my mustang clock.

Every hour I'm reminded of another mustang and another generation passing me by.

Of course, it drives the guy at the call center crazy when cars go by.

Dave: The car only exists in some very rough prototypes, which...when I say it exists, it exists from a chassis standpoint.

We've taken the existing mustang, and we have cobbled it up and bolted on all of the new bits and pieces to make it drive.

That's the only form that exists.

Nothing real about it.
It's still just a model.

Tom Barnes, he is the leader from the engineering team.

They're the ones that make all of the thoughts and then the sketches, and the dream and the vision actually come to reality.

Steve: Whatever that car's gonna drive like, sound like, how quick is it, all that stuff will come through tom.

Hau: If you think of the mustang as a company,

Dave pericak as the chief engineer is the ceo, and tom Barnes is his chief technical officer.

He's got the lead on all the technical issues.

Steve: Where Dave is more the captain of the ship, Tom is, I don't know...
Scotty.

Data doesn't show what you'd feel, which is very odd.

People have been working on this car for 55 years.

We're just a slice in time.

Nine million people have bought this car, so the design people do what they need to do.

We engineer the car to work around the awesome looks.

Dave: I always like the creative tension between the design studio and the engineering teams.

If you're not frustrated with the design community, you probably have a boring design because to engineer a really good design is a lot harder than to engineer a box.

Tom: You hear a car start and then you can hear this and you know...you're like, "that's a mustang."

You can tell.
You can hear it.

You hear a car pull away...and you're like, "there's a mustang."

Woman: We must have 50 different exhausts that we go through and we've tuned

- to make it sound right.

Jack: Engineers can follow the development of a car day by day, almost hour by hour.

When any changes are made, they instantly have that information so they can work out the feasibility.

Tom: Most of the time, it's very, very cool.

Sometimes it can be, you know, frustrating.

You need to hit certain timing constraints, and I always feel like...try not to look at constraints and just look where the goal is and figure out how to get to the goal.

Julie: You want to engineer smart and you wanna engineer on time.

There are times at night that that's a lot of pressure.

You don't want to be the guy who gets to stand up when we get to job 1 and say to the vice president, "not quite done yet."

I don't even know how I'm gonna do that, Brent.

When the decisions come to Dave, it's usually, "here is the cost," and-or the trade-offs.

There is no more money.

It is a one-in, one-out game now.

Art: What keeps him up at night is the same thing that used to keep me up at night at this same point in time, which is, "what are the things I don't know?

Because the things I don't know are gonna hurt me."

I don't know, I mean, I don't know what to do with this.

Or I don't know how to escalate.

Don't misunderstand what we're saying.

The steering wheel does not buzz nearly as much as it used to, no doubt, but it is still buzzing and especially when you're the driver, you're feeling it in your hand, and you're feeling it in your foot, and those two together, you're feeling a whole lot of vibration.

You need to think ahead of all those potential things that could go wrong and there's a thousand...more than a thousand of them.

- So you can hear a little bit of latchiness, right?
- Yeah.

They filled that with a softer rubber.

Tom: A lot of what I end up doing and certainly what Dave ends up doing is just pushing, constant pushing...what's next and what's beyond?

Let's keep going.

Dave: Time lost is our enemy.

Once you get behind, you never catch up.

Candidly, if we're gonna have this car out in fall that means we have to start building it right now.

That means we have to be finished engineering it last month.

Art: When he got the job, I had, actually, a discussion with him about this particular point.

The first thing I noticed was so many people came up to me and said, "don't screw this up."

I mean, high in the company, low in the company, dealers, friends of mine outside the company.

A lot of people just said, "don't screw this up.

You screw this up, you're screwing up the entire country.

This is bigger than Ford so don't screw it up."

Man: We are out to strengthen our position in a field where the risk is high and where the competition runs strong.

Our mutual stake in success is a big one, perhaps the biggest any of us will ever have in a single venture.

I'm Henry Ford II.

I would like to begin these brief comments by offering a Sincere welcome to all of you who have joined us, and we look forward to a long and mutually rewarding association based on friendship, understanding, and sound business principles.

Henry Ford was an interesting guy.

You gotta remember, he came into the company, you know, out of the Navy.

I think he was like 26 or 27.

You seem to get a very nice reception, Mr. Ford.

A lot more than I deserve, I'm sure of that.

It would be hard to be sure of yourself.

I mean, what the hell do you know at 26 or 27 about running a major automobile company?

Henry Ford II was the apple of Henry Ford i's eye.

I mean, he was his namesake and the first grandchild that Henry Ford had and Henry Ford took him everywhere.

Man: Henry, did you know your grandfather well?

Did you...did you, uh...well, I felt I knew him very well, Bob.

We were always brought up to go out on weekends out at fairlane with my grandmother and grandfather, and he used to give us, really, the run of the place.

Hal: It was a difficult process for him because he didn't have the background, and I don't say that critically.

He had never worked in finance.

He never worked in engineering or manufacturing or purchasing.

To his credit, he was smart enough to get people in the company that did.

Man: Ford was in trouble.

GM and Chrysler were better managed.

We brought in a group of ten young army, air force officers, who became known as the whiz kids.

They are the ten men in the front row of this picture.

They included Tex Thornton, Robert McNamara, and Arjay Miller as well.

It was such an intriguing story.

Here was this tremendous company in such bad shape.

When we went to Ford, the whiz kids, back in '46, to find out how much money they owed at the end of the year, they just counted the open invoices, but they were about 40 feet of invoices and they figured out it was so many million per foot of invoices.

That's how they knew how much money they owed at the end of the year.

It's hard to believe how chaotic they were.

Gale: The whiz kids took control of finances in the company, and they got Mr. Ford back on track.

The demand for automobiles in the United States has been rising for more than three years and shows no signs of tapering off.

Arjay: He felt he had inherited a company it was his obligation to keep it going.

We all liked Henry Ford II.
He was a warm person.

He was the boss, but the most important building block in the company are the people.

Every company is faced by the same market, the same technology.

It's the people that make the difference.

Henry Ford II understood that.

He brought in Lee Iacocca, who was simply the best car salesman the world has ever known.

Man: Probably the most important thing to remember about Lee Iacocca is, without him, the whole story of the mustang...that story would not even exist.

He joined Ford as an engineer, but he found very quickly that he could do other things.

So in Philadelphia, he started doing Ford sales work as a district-type person.

This is 1956, and he contemplated a way that the average person could by a 1956 Ford and pay $56 a month as a payment.

So the "56 for 56" slogan was popular.

It sold hundreds of thousands of more fords than they ever thought they would sell.

Henry Ford II recognized that, and that's how he got to dearborn.

Dave: For our customers, for our loyalists, the people who love this machine, the prototype is like, you know, it's like almost the holy grail.

We're gonna do whatever it takes to protect this vehicle.

So one of the things we're doing is we...this actually represents a part of the new car, a small portion of the new car.

So we don't want anybody to see this.

We put foam and this material over this, and that way when it's out on the road and someone wants to photograph it, they have no idea what's going on.

They know there's something going on in this area, but they don't know what's going on.

We'll end up having to do a lot of nighttime testing on fairly secure Ford facilities where we can peel all that back, but we certainly don't want anyone to see it until it's time so...

- Right.
- Do you want to show this one?

Sure. Why not?
Let's do it.

The next, what I will say, big milestone is what we call preliminary engineering cutoff.

We've basically engineered the car, and now we gotta drive them and make sure that they ride correctly, they steer correctly, there aren't any kind of error states.

Dave: Everybody is trying to figure out what the next guy is doing because if they've got the better gadget or if they have a better hood, unique wheel, you name it, then they're gonna want to have it, too.

And it's not about who invents it first, it's about who gets it out first.

Barnes did not want to be the first guy caught in a mustang.

It was fully camouflaged.
It was time, so I made tom take the car out to go evaluate something.

And he came back, and as he tossed me the keys, he said, "congratulations."
And I said, "what?"

He said, "you'll see me on the Internet soon."

- Yeah, there's tom.

- There's barnesie.
- He was so proud of that moment.

Tom: I was testing out on the track.

It was all working, but while it needs to function, you can write down the numbers and all that stuff, a lot of what a car is, I mean it's still needs to have character.

Really the mustang in itself is, you know, a character.

What would the world be without a mustang?

It's hard to imagine.

Woman: Ford mustang.

People sing about it not necessarily because it rhymes with anything, but because it's part of our culture.

Art: People will say, "when I get in my mustang, I feel like I'm a different person.

I am Steve McQueen."

John: Ford wanted instant street credibility.

How do you get instant credibility?

You want to race in it.

The idea was you win on Sunday, and you sell on Monday.

Mustang showed it could be a race car,

I think principally with carroll Shelby's help.

We've got a couple of new entries in our stable this year, the new mustang-based gt350, first American car of its kind.

Edsel: He just started putting high-performance engines in mustangs and making them extra special.

Art: It was a performance vehicle that was accessible.

You know this is not a 911 Porsche.

It's not a snooty.

Hal: That was the basic thing that made this work, the fact that you could bring genuine aspiration down to the affordable.

Little old you could have something this neat.

Fast, fun and affordable, that's the essence of mustang.

Tom: Dave was talking about, the other day, some people think you just follow the recipe and then, okay, then it pops out, and it's really good.

That's not how that happens.

You know you have this all-American classic, but to be successful, you have to constantly innovate, and there is always a possibility of failure.

By failing, I mean delivering a product that would not be viewed as a mustang.

In '94, mustang was gonna go to front-wheel drive.

It was going to be transverse v6 engine front-wheel drive European sports sedan.

That is fundamental change.

There was one school of thought that it would make it more fuel-efficient, we would get better return potentially, then there was a camp that said, "that's not what a mustang is."

Steve: When this news broke, there was a massive letter-writing campaign.

Art: 100,000 letters from customers coming in questioning the chemical makeup of our brain.

They were convinced we were on drugs, I think.

Hau: They actually had a demonstration outside of Ford world headquarters.

Fortunately, the product was launched as a separate product called a probe, and we stuck with the tried-and-true rear-wheel drive formula for the mustang.

Steve: It's probably one of the biggest coups ever in the automotive industry.

The customers rising up and changing your product?

I don't think it's ever happened before.

It turned out to be a great car, the '94 mustang.

I remember when it came out, I was in high school.

Beautiful car.

Man: Welcome back to "muscle cars on the radio" broadcasting coast to coast on 132 radio stations.

Joining us on the "muscle cars on the radio" hotline, Dave pericak, chief nameplate engineer for the 2015 mustang.

- Welcome back, Dave.
- Thanks, Gary.

Thanks for having me on the show.

I love the fact that you kept the sequential tail lights.

There are some things you just can't change, Dave.

I tell you, the sequential tail lamps, at one time, was discussed on whether or not they should stay in the car purely from a financial standpoint, and that discussion, you can see who won the discussion.

As I basically told them, "well, then you might need a new chief engineer."

You also got rid of the hockey-stick "l" on the sides of the doors...

Hau: When he took the job, I said, "Dave, the best thing about working on mustang is everybody knows what a mustang is. The worst thing about working on mustang is everybody knows what a mustang is, and they'll tell you."

Man: Sometimes I wish that I was on one of these committees where they ask public opinion because I'd rip most of these cars.

Man: A lot of people were afraid it's gonna be a major European look.

Man: Some people are afraid it's not gonna have that old muscle-car image.

I just never pictured mustang again with four cylinders.

Dave: Everyone wants to be the chief engineer and everyone wants to design the car.

Man: Photos have leaked on the Internet.

I think those are just Photoshop pictures that are out there, and my first reaction was, "that really doesn't look like a mustang."

Man: I don't want them to water it down.

Some of the other cars, they look so similar.

But I guess it has to appeal to more people now.

Dave: Our customers are not afraid to tell us what they want and why they want it.

Man: I want it to look like a mustang.

If you see the first one, you'll say, "that's a mustang."

Well, I think everyone gets emotional about the mustang because number one, most people have had a passion for the car when they were young and when they were growing up, whether it was within their family, their dad had one, their brother had one, that was the first car they ever drove, it was the first date they'd ever had, you know.

I grew up in Chicago, south suburb of Chicago.

As a little kid we'd always take things apart and try to figure out how they worked and put them back together again, which kind of freaked my mom out a little bit, but my dad thought it was really cool.

So my brothers are about ten years older than me, and they were into cars way before I even was.

The mustangs just always caught my attention.

Art: Not everybody that's been in that job really knows what a mustang is, but Dave does.

When you talk to him, you can see he gets the emotional connection in a very deep way.

I was a young engineer here at Ford.

My boss had a '94 mustang.

He was going out of town, and I asked him if I could borrow his car.

He said, "yeah, sure, no problem."

So I drove it to Chicago and took my girlfriend out on a date.

And I pulled up in front of the high school where we had met, in fact, the very room that we had met.

I told her something was wrong with the car, and she didn't know any different, and I got out, and I opened up the door and I knelt down and asked her to marry me in that mustang.

For me, this is the dream job, and I've said this to a vice president in this company, "you have me in this chair for a reason. While I'm in it, I'm gonna do all of the right things for the mustang customer."

Man: Joining us on the "muscle cars on the radio" hotline, Dave pericak, chief nameplate engineer for the 2015 mustang.

- Welcome back, Dave.
- Thanks, Gary. Thanks for having me on the show.

Henry: I think the greatest pleasure that I experience is a successful product.

To see people walk in and spend their hard-earned money buying our products is a great thrill and great success.

Man: Do you have to make great sacrifices for it?

Well, in terms of time, surely, yes.

It absorbs most of your weekdays and probably a good portion of your weekends.

It's a consuming job, let's say that.

Man: Do you regret that at all?

I don't think so.

I picked the business, and I'm here, and I sort of like it.

Lee Iacocca was no dummy.

He knew the timing was right to take the American population and introduce them to something different.

Hal: In 1960, Lee was made vice president of the Ford division, which is a huge move.

There was an air about him that was a little mysterious.

I can remember watching these guys escort him around the various studios and smoking his big cigar.

You know, it looked like the mafia had arrived.

It was really pretty cool.

That is so god damn basic to running...

Bob: He knew that his ideas were good, and he surrounded himself with good, creative people.

One of those people was hal sperlich.

Iacocca was a dynamic leader, but the guy that made it happen was hal sperlich.

Hal: Sometime in the early '60s, what became the mustang project got started.

My first introduction to it was with don frey, my boss, who told me that Iacocca and the market research people had identified a rather dramatic shift in demographics that was going to take place, the arrival of the baby boomers.

Jack: The market was untouched.
It was younger buyers.

There was nothing for them to buy, you know, that they could afford.

Hal: Most innovation is how to be ahead of the market, you know, how to be ahead of where demand is at the moment.

Iacocca, who was very much interested in making a mark, decided that that would be his mark.

Bob: When 1960 happened, when the decade started, none of the auto manufacturers in the United States were building compact cars.

The big stodgy rolling tanks and couches that went down the highway, that was the state of production in those years.

"This is the way we build cars.
Take it or leave it."

Well, that changed.

The baby boomers said, "we want something that brings us into the modern times."

They wanted modern refrigerators, they wanted modern furniture, they wanted a modern house, and they wanted a modern car.

Ford didn't have a car that was a modern car, and that's what they discovered was this market.

Lee decided to have the discussions off-campus.

Man: To discuss a business proposition of great mutual interest.

Bob: They met after hours clandestinely at the fairlane inn without Henry Ford's knowledge.

They knew if he got wind of them, it would be canceled simply because of the edsel.

The design of the future is a great question.

I don't think the cars can get any longer.

They're plenty long enough and actually, I think, they're really practically as low as they're gonna get.

Henry Ford wanted to reinvent the industry.

He wanted new technology, something different and fresh and exciting, a car that hit all of those parameters.

Henry: The birth of this new line of automobiles is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The eyes of the American people will be on edsel.

John: He came out with one of the most well-researched cars in the history of automobilia.

It was called the edsel.

Henry: And so I am proud and pleased to confirm that our new line of cars will carry the name edsel in honor of my father, who served as president of Ford motor company.

When you talk edsel today, you talk of the flop of all time.

- It didn't sell.
- I'm ruined!

Bob: The people that actually worked on the edsel project became known as e-guys, and the e-guys were bad guys around Ford motor company.

Henry Ford didn't wanna have anything to do with them.

Do you think people will ever forget the edsel?

Oh, god, I hope so.

Edsel: I used to always ask him, "why did you let them call the car edsel?"

He said it was the management team that beat him down.

I mean, who knows?

I just think that it's the wrong car at the wrong time with the wrong design.

Hal: It didn't work out, and the company canned it.

That's a pretty expensive process, and it's embarrassing, which is why people get nervous about innovating.

He had to bear in mind that the likes of Iacocca and others were putting their careers on the line.

To be for something as unique as the mustang project was in its time was a high-risk game.

We go out to one of our proving grounds out in Arizona and we drive the car.

That in itself is an emotional event.

Tom: We had our senior management out in Arizona.

We had a lot of aspirational vehicles, and I'm talking things like Porsche 911, and then we also had our m1 prototype for the upcoming mustang.

What we're gonna do...you'll each go in cars, and Dave and frank are gonna be in one pair, then you'll flip.

Frank: This vehicle had to be world-class.

We're gonna sell it in Europe.

You have to be world-class to be in Europe.

You're going against the big dogs in those other markets, so you set your targets from an aspirational standpoint.

Steve: We had police cordon off all the roads.

We went around the tops of all the mountains around, to make sure that there wasn't anybody up there.

It was incredibly nerve-racking.
Nobody's seen...we hadn't seen the car out in the wild.

A beautiful car is great, but if it doesn't exceed the outgoing car, people will be disappointed.

The toughest critic I know is probably Dave.

He takes this stuff to heart.

Tom: The car is definitely coming together.

It's just that it's a little short on target on a few things.

But do we know why or we just don't know why?

No, we have a very good idea why.

We do wind tunnel tests, rough road tests.

We do high-mileage drives, low-mileage drives.

We do cold-weather drives.
We do warm-weather drives.

It's pretty difficult to anticipate where the next issue is gonna come from.

- What was that?
- I don't know.

Julie: Because they come from the left.

They come from the right.
They come from everywhere.

That's what happened.
It did fault. Okay.

Just got the camo off just a couple days ago.

And so there were some surprises.

The amount of camo did some damping, and so we have some things that have popped up, but we'll address them, and we'll go through them.

We've got an entire team of people who support these tests and drives.

Because we don't have a ton of prototypes running around, we try to do this all analytically.

So we try to model what we think the system is gonna do because, really, it's quite costly to find the error state in the vehicle and then engineer it out.

We'd rather engineer the fix in right the first time.

Tom: I will say it's surprising how much the camo affected the steering feel.

This is a live issue.

I mean, can at least one of our open issues for our engineering sign off?

Frank: Tom's the guy that really brings it all together and makes a proposal to Dave to say, "here's what it takes to get to the next level."

Gotta give tom a lot of credit for being the thread of mustang.

He's been on mustang for ten years.

I always kid him he's probably trained, you know, at least five chief engineers.

Shit, man, i rocketed down through here about 160 miles an hour.

Man on radio: There is a police officer on the right-hand shoulder.

So just be aware that the speed limit is 55 through here.

I feel like this doesn't move nearly as much as the other car.

Probably isn't, and that gets into...you remember all the a-pillar stiffness we did?

- Yeah.
- Well, the a-pillar stiffness.

So that's why I'm trying to get from body and from nvh what is happening for that sorb fix.

- It's on the torque box.
- Right.

It's down there, it's right at the base frickin'...and there's some massive shit going on down there.

Dave: I flew out there with the team to one of our proving grounds out in Arizona, and we drive the car, the gt version of the mustang, and...I wasn't quite there.

It was great, but it just wasn't great enough.

What is it that we don't have?

- Here's the problem--
- is it the pads?

The team worked really hard to get us to that point, and I just, you know, looked at the team and said, "guys, I don't think we're there."

I understand people are working.
We just got to make sure they got everything they need and there's no hold-ups and we can go as fast as we can.

I am a perfectionist.

I don't know that anything is ever perfect, you just keep trying to get there, and you never quite get there, but along the way, you just keep getting better.

Roy orbison: How could you make a car that was low-cost and exciting?

Not easy.

In fact, often when you see a lower-priced car really take off, it's because somebody's figured out how to bring the aspiration vehicle down to a lower price, and that was certainly the inspiration to create the mustang.

For some reason, it just wasn't working very well.

Several studios had a crack at it, and it really wasn't coming until Iacocca decided he wanted to have a competition and give...I think it was seven design studios each a crack using the exact same packet.

I figured if you're gonna make a really inexpensive car, we had to build it from something inexpensive, and Ford had the falcon, probably the least expensive car on the planet.

We decided to try to use it as a base, the proportions and the stance and so forth, and I was the cop to make sure these guys didn't cheat.

Gale: I was at the Ford studio when hal sperlich came in and said, "Iacocca wants to see some new designs."

And we only had about three weeks to do it.

So I went home, sat at the kitchen table and I sketched out four or five quick sketches.

When I joined Ford, they called me the farm boy.

I was working with a bunch of guys from New York and California.

They were doing airbrushed drawings of beautiful cars, and I thought, "I'm in the wrong spot.

I can't compete with these guys."

Hal: Came to the big showdown, and there was Iacocca and myself and a few others and, of course, the fathers of each of these seven cars, and there were, like, three or four that were fantastic.

They picked my sketch to be put on the driver's side of the Clay.

Iacocca said, "you know, this is the car."

I remember Lee turning, and he said, "we got it."

So that was it.

Hal: When it was approved, it was a cougar, and the symbol on the grill was a cat.

That didn't last very long.

Someplace along the line, the marketing axis under Lee's leadership decided that the car should be called a mustang, not the cougar.

There's something so uniquely American in the word "mustang."

He knew it could be used for marketing.

Bob: Iacocca knew that anything that he would propose to Henry Ford was going to be a problem because Henry didn't want to launch off into another financial disaster.

The eyes of the American people will be on edsel.

Hal: In the case of the mustang, you're saying, "we can sell this large number of cars in a market that will exist once we bring this car out," but we couldn't say, "here's proof this will work," 'cause there wasn't any proof.

This came...this came from the gut.

Bob: That time, it took about $75 million to get a car from concept into production.

Hal: Lee brought Mr. Ford over.

You got to remember, Ford motor company wasn't a democracy.

It was a totalitarian state, and Lee is just selling, selling, selling.

That's his bag, right?
He's the great persuader.

Bob: Iacocca wanted $75 million, and Henry Ford said, "you got $45 million.
Go with it.

That's all you're getting, not a dime more."

The program was approved, and people filed out of the room.

I was out there with Iacocca, and Mr. Ford came up.

He said, "okay, you got your god damn car. It better work."

Does it say what color?

Maroon.
It's right there.

Oh, that one.

They are good-looking, barnesie.

Hi, Kelly.

What do you think of the new car?

I hope so, too.

You're definitely the minority at this moment.

We gotta have it grow on you.

Tom: We'll see you.

No, we love your opinions.

- Tom: You like it?
- You like it?

That's about the best mustang I've ever seen in a long time!

Good deal.
Good deal. Thanks.

Pencils are down, and there's no more engineering work on this car.

It's pure execution phase from here.

It's just making sure that we get this thing ready to go into the showrooms.

We're in what we call our manufacturing launch process.

- Man: T minus 10, 9...
- We've completed all of our development.

Ignition.

Lift off.
Lift off.

And now we're going into production.

We're literally building prototype vehicles on the assembly lines to get the manufacturing process up and running.

And then once we have that, we can go back to David and the team and say, "we have high confidence that you can go ahead into full production at full line speed."

Dave: Our program manager, prakash patel, he's got a tough job.

He's kind of like the guy that...he makes sure that everyone in the band is playing on the right note and that everybody plays when they're supposed to play.

Frank: The program manager to a team like this is so important because they're the hammer.

I call them the hammer.

They have to keep the vehicle on time.

Hau: A lot of things have to come together, not only at our plant at flat rock, but at every single supplier site all around the world.

Everything on that car has kind of a DNA.

Whether it's a part that is manufactured at the plant, whether it is a system that comes into the plant, everything for that particular car needs to be there on that date, that time.

It's mind-boggling how...how they're able to do this.

At this point, we have started the car.

We have designed the parts.

We have confirmed everything in the virtual world, and we said, "this is where we are."

Dave: Every millimeter was fought over, every little millimeter on the vehicle.

You can imagine we have some very emotional discussions about headlamps and tail lamps and bumpers and, you know, you name it.

You do feel the weight on the shoulder, but the weight is that you have to deliver what you said you wanted.

Hold on, if we had this experience in s197, why did we get them on s550?

Who told us to give them more business?

Art: We're not launching a vehicle as much as we are launching hundreds and hundreds of supplier facilities around the country.

We build our engines and transmissions in-house, but pretty much everything else we purchase from our suppliers.

But why should I pay tribal anything?

There's so many places where the system could fall apart.

But why is not their fault?
If they're not delivering a quality part, why is that not fault?

Hau: We actually go out to our suppliers and help them.

We're only successful if they're successful, so we can't afford to let them fail.

Okay, that's what I said.

So I...that's what I said, if they are going out of business and if they are distressed, let me know, and I will figure out a way to pay the 47,000 bucks, okay?

But at this point in the program, I cannot just spend that kind of money just because.

Gale: You have to weigh it and say, "we gotta spend the money on this, and we'll save it someplace else."

Because everything that's good isn't the cheapest.

Okay, who's next?
Brian?

What's going on is that on the...when the rocker moldings are going on, they're not getting proper hand clearance between the rocker molding and the wheel.

They physically cannot reach their hand in there to install the push pin.

It's almost every wheel, this is a problem.

No way, guys.
Buck 34 a car?

Customer gets nothing for it.

There's gotta be a better solution.

This is just the worst use of our money.

Prakash: When I started in this industry,

I would go to changes like, "why are you guys bickering about six cents?

Here, here's six cents."
Right?

But you multiply that by years, by number of cars, it makes a big deal.

Take $1.34 times hundred thousand cars times five years, $1, you just spent half a million dollars.

Okay, next.

That is the decision you just signed off.

As a representative of Ford motor company, you just said, "it is okay to spend half a million dollars."

Big difference, a dollar versus half a million dollars.

Are you guys sure this is a must-fix, right?

Yeah. I signed it.
Four cents more, why?

Because a longer fastener?

Man: That's for the fastener.

We'll go sort out the money.

Don't come back for another change, okay?

We gotta get this thing done.

To an engineer...and I'm an engineer...if you give an engineer enough time, money, it can be done.

We can put a person on the moon.

You just need a lot of time and a lot of money.

You know, remember, automotive industry's over 100 years old now.

It's not like we are doing a lot of stuff that hasn't been done before.

A car is a car.

At it's most basic, an automobile is automobile.

But to come out with a winning product, you have to make choices, and the team that makes the most correct choices at the most opportune time wins.

I was at the 1964 world's fair.

They had all the various pavilions, but the one that caught my eye was right in the front.

It was the Ford rotunda and outside of it was a mustang.

Me and my brother sat in that line for a long time while everybody wandered around.

It was quite a memorable thing for me.

It just hit me.

Hal: In April of '64, when the car came out, the same week, made the cover of both time and newsweek, so there was an energy.

This was something big in America.

Announcer: Introducing the unexpected, the new Ford mustang.

Frank: They booked time on all three networks so it was completely blasted to the world.

People swamped the dealerships.

They actually had to call police, the crowds were so big.

In the first 18 months, they sold a million of these cars.

They could not build mustang fast enough.

Hal: Iacocca was betting his career, but he was betting in an area in which he had a unique skill.

He knew the market.

He was as good as they get.

Eventually, Lee became President of the company.

He was the king.

Male reporter: Lee Iacocca, president of the Ford motor company, was fired by Henry Ford II, chairman of the board.

Publicly, they said it was a disagreement about the company's management.

Privately, by one report, Iacocca asked Ford why, what he had done wrong?"

And Ford answered, "i just don't like you."

I don't know if you know, I was fired along with Iacocca from the company.

So it's...it was a dangerous place.

You know.

He came to work one day, and everything was a normal day.

And when he left that afternoon, he was fired.

It happened that fast.

On a personal basis, I liked Iacocca.

He was smart...

The energy, sense of humor.

On the business side, he had one big fault...too large an ego.

He actually thought that he could get the directors to put him over Henry.

I learned about it, and when I told Henry Ford about it, he fired Iacocca.

Did that make him a dictator?

Well, that's the way you run a company.

You can't run a company if you're going to have two guys competing for the top job.

Get that cleared up right away.

You were asked a question many, many times.

If you knew how bad it was, would you have done it?

Nobody would do that in life.

If you knew...if god let you know what was coming next, a lot of guys would go and shoot themselves.

He don't let you know that, thank god, okay?

So that's a silly question, in a way.

Would you like to go in the infantry for four years and get shot at?

No.
If I had a choice, no.

If I knew that, I wouldn't have joined up in the war.

I know, but you don't know how bad it's gonna be.

So, no, yeah.

That's destiny, they call that.

Don't fight it.

Next time I'm gonna control my destiny, though.

My job is not to yell at people and make...I'll do that if I need to, but that's not my job.

My job is to be the biggest cheerleader in the group.

It's funny, I think people are more...they're more than willing to walk out on a limb, even if they think that limb might break, if they know that you're gonna be there to catch them.

And I think that's the biggest thing.

I think that's the freedom.

As a leader, what I try to do is I try to give them the freedom.

There's a lot of smart people held back by their own fears or inhibitions.

And if you allow them to go out on the edge, hang out a little bit, knowing that no matter what happens, you will catch them, they will go out on the thinnest branches even though they think, "that thing's gonna crack," they'll go because they know you're gonna be there for them.

And when they start doing that, when more and more people start doing that, the power that you unleash is unbelievable.

Because when everyone stays reserved and, "I'm not gonna do that because I might fail," or, "i might get hurt," or whatever, then the whole team doesn't progress as far forward as they could.

But when they're out there slaying dragons because they know that if the dragon gets a little unruly that you're gonna come in and finish him off, they'll slay dragons all day long for you, man.

Right?

You want to be interviewed?

Man: Oh, yeah, man.
I'm the man.

What you wanna talk about?
2015 mustang.

- What do you think?
- I think it's an awesome car.

- You think it's an awesome car?
- I think it's gonna sell good and it's gonna keep a lot of people working here.

- It's a legend man.
It's a legend.
- It is a legend.

And it gets better and better over time.

That's the beauty of it.

Thank you for helping us build it, man.

No problem. No problem.
You got me, right?

- All right.

At the beginning of a program, it's all hope and potential and opportunity and stuff.

You know, frankly, once you start a program, 95% of what you learn is bad.

Of course, yeah.

By design, this edge has to be parallel to this edge.

Right.

Art: It is a tenuous time in the program, there's a lot that can go wrong from here.

I thank you, the Ford motor company thanks you.

He thanks you.

The shareholders and stockholders thank you.

- Bill Ford thanks you.

Thanks, guys.
All right, what else?

Hau: Often times, you're defending the car.

You're fighting for the car, and there are days when you go home and you feel like, "wow, nobody wants me to be successful."

Was it deemed a failure out of cae, or was it something that, as we looked at it, we thought, "hey, it'd be nice to have another mil or two of clearance?"

Woman: I mean, obviously, the vehicle requirement is no contact between the bracket and the solenoid, and what you guys showed was a one-mil contact.

Therefore, it was a failure.

Man: It was a personal foul of one mil.

Dave: The program's hanging by a millimeter at the moment.

Man: No, it's just that we believe that if we're showing contact from the cae model, we're likely to have a fracture.

So I guess that's kind of where we are.

Hau: You very rarely ever see a repeat chief engineer.

You're either viewed as being successful and you get asked to go do something bigger and better or you get asked to go do something different.

Man: All right, so we've got everybody lined up.

They'll re-mesh the file, they'll get it rerun tonight.

The model will be done by noon tomorrow, yes?

Man: Having looked at the model, and maybe I'm being a wild-ass optimist here, I think we're on the verge of getting that.

I think we're right there.

At the end of the day, we've got to have zero major issues, and like I said, it's not done until we get all the way up to job 1.

Dave's been a chief for, you know, quite a while, so in a lot of ways, it's make or break sometimes.

But I mean, you just have to live...you just have to live for the car that you're on.

No.

I can be very clear about that. No.

One year I counted every bird that we had.

I just said, "I'm gonna do it."

They're literally like our friends.

Woman: I don't even fill the back birdfeeder anymore because you fill it up, and an hour later, squirrels will have just devoured it, thrown it all on the ground and whatever.

Tom still fills the back one.
I don't.

Absolutely, squirrels deserve every right they, you know, we can provide them.

Woman: I don't think he works harder than the job needs.

There are times where I wish there was a cutoff where it would stop.

But a lot of times it doesn't.
It can't stop.

We say to each other, "it is what it is."

Tom: You know, we've worked on this 50th car since 2009.

It takes a long time.

You have to have endurance, and you just have to keep...

Going.

So many things are very simple, but it's very hard to make something special.

You know, I mean, you can look at it different ways.

You could say, "it's just a car," you know, whatever.

There's 60 million cars made a year in the world now and this is just, you know, one out of probably 1,000 different varieties you could buy.

Lots of people do it and it should be pretty simple and standard, but it is very complicated, and it has to be right.

It's so hard to explain because it's so big.

Young woman: We are here for mustangs across America for the 50th anniversary of mustang, and it's the second day of the cross-country trip.

And we will be driving to las cruces later, right?

- Is that how we say it?
- That is correct. Good job.

We restored this 1971 mustang as a father-daughter project.

We started in 2010.

Took us about three, three and a half years to get it done, and we actually just finished it this week.

Man: I am really envious of all of you getting to spend a week together driving your favorite cars across the U.S., and I expect to hear all the stories in Charlotte.

- There you go. Square key.
- Yeah, I know.

Young woman: Mustang's always gonna have a special place in my heart because it's the first restoration I've ever done with my dad.

It's my car.
It's my type of car.

Okay, where are we?

The shape it's in, I think that is a success story.

Hau: When you're done, it's kind of an odd feeling.

You certainly feel a sense of satisfaction of being on a very long journey, but that tension is always there, you know, is it gonna stand the test of time?

Every new car that you do, you go look at a production car, it's an emotion.

You saw her from the sketch, and here it is in metal.

You can open the door.
You can sit in it.

You can drive it, that's emotional.

It really is.

And if it isn't, you've failed.

Woman: It's the time for the big reveal, the worldwide reveal.

The 2015 mustang!
Come on out!

I love this car.
It's beautiful.

As soon as it comes out, I'll be first in line at the dealer.

2015 mustang.

Man: Dave pericak is the chief engineer for the mustang.

When you build a new car, you got a lot of history you have to honor.

What was the main thing you wanted to do new...

It's modernized that original 1964 mustang.

The shape of the front grille, it's just like it was back then.

Man: I like the shape, especially the back lights.

It's just like my '66.

Dave: I want them to say that they got it right, that this is the best mustang that they've ever done.

- This is awesome.
- It is. It is awesome.

Bob: Henry Ford was a firm believer in several things...simplicity, durability, and low cost.

He always professed that if you could do those three things, you would win the hearts of the customers.

Growing up in an era where everybody had a horse, he'd say to the people, "what do you want?"

You know, and they'd always say, "a faster horse."

He gave them something different.

John: That's why mustang is different.

They didn't ask the marketplace, "what do you want?"

They were car people, and they said, "what do we want?"

Man: Whatever year your favorite mustang is, whatever color it is, whatever's your favorite, it will be there in Charlotte.

Young woman: I think my favorite aspect of this car would have to be how original we made it and how original it is.

It looks like a mustang that you would have seen rolling around in 1971.

And I really, really like that aspect of it.

Woman: If I could ask you all to please rise for our national anthem.

Prakash: People forget...

That we are engineers, but we are people, and people make cars.

They build cars, they design cars, they develop cars, they style cars.

So whether we like it or not, people's personalities are reflected in what they do.

And no two people are alike.

Hau: It's a fraternity of people who worked on this car.

That's what makes it special, and certainly, for me, it's a part of me.

Once you work on the mustang, you're always part of team mustang.

Hal: Somehow you are connected to something that was exciting.

That connection's still there.

It's still a love affair that happened way back when, and people are still knocked out by it and still excited about it.

Gale: You know what I used to use as a Gauge on the cars that I worked on is I would say to myself, "would I like to wash this car?

Would I feel happy out there washing it and cleaning it as a designer?"

And that was a goal I personally had.

How many people like to go out and wash their car?

Only if it's a favorite car that they like to drive or something.

If it's a car they don't really like that much, they don't wash it at all, right?