How I’d Design A 1980s Fox Body Mustang For The Modern Era

Every generation thinks the era that they grew up in produced the coolest cars, music, and fashions. Those of us who came of age in the eighties, of course, simply know the decade of decadence was beyond reproach. Don’t agree with us? We’ll roll up the sleeves on our epaulet-shouldered nylon jackets and “show you what time it is.”

Seriously though, after years of ridicule, the styles of the eighties are finally getting respect, and that includes cars. Obviously, Reagan-era rides like a Lancia Delta Integrale or a Ferrari F40 were held in high esteem from day one, but now more pedestrian vehicles from those years are getting a well-deserved reassessment as standout designs.

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One car in particular is the 1979-94 third-generation “Fox” Mustang that defined the automotive rise from the ashes out of the dreaded Malaise years. Naturally, Ford wants to capitalize on this nostalgia, but the recent efforts they’ve shown in that task were a bit lacking. An Autopian reader requested that I try to do a better job of giving younger Boomers and GenXers a true retro version of their favorite Mustang. Who am I to say no?

The Many Malaise Moods Of Mustang

The term “Malaise” was coined years back by Autopian friend and sometime contributor Murilee Martin, but the use of the word often gets applied to cars that don’t fit the true description of the phrase. To me, the best way to properly give the definition to “Malaise” is to follow the path of America’s favorite Pony Car, the Ford Mustang, since it follows the arc of the era almost perfectly.

Like most domestic cars, at the beginning of the seventies, the Mustang was a large and possibly oversized product of a time when people thought twenty-cents-a-gallon gas would last forever. Import cars were just outliers for cheapskates or freaks, and safety or emissions control requirements would hopefully get repealed or stabilized. That didn’t happen.

Performance suffered drastically when the ”large” 1971 Mustang lost the “Boss” 351 (except for a rare, detuned version) and big block 429 engines for 1972; now there wasn’t the oomph needed to make up for the gains in size and weight. The Malaise era was upon us.

Thankfully for Ford, the Pinto-based 1974 Mustang II arrived just in time for the first energy crisis. The Mustang II was drastically smaller than the previous car and offered “luxury” and “sport” options that were mainly vestigial things painted or glued on; if there’s a better example of the true meaning of “Malaise”, I don’t know what it is. Lee Iacocca knew what the market needed even if Mustang faithful didn’t want it (it’s still the fourth best-selling Mustang of all time).

By the late seventies, Detroit was finally moving beyond its initial knee-jerk reactions and giving us better solutions to the onslaught of smog regulations, gas crunches, and foreign cars better suited to this new status quo. For 1979, Ford gave us an all-new Mustang that looked a lot more Deutschland than Dearborn.

There’s a good reason for that. Long before he became known for the aero T-Bird and Taurus, designer Jack Telnack had reshaped the offerings of Ford’s European offerings when he was put in charge of that division in 1974. You can see the look in this new-for-1978 Granada (why didn’t we get this Granada instead of the Iacocca Maverick Mercedes one we were stuck with?).

He then brought that same crisp aesthetic across the pond and applied it to the Mustang II’s much-needed successor, which was based on Ford’s new lightweight “Fox” platform with Euro-style McPherson struts up front and coils (instead of archaic leaf springs) on the rear axle. Oh, sure, the Fairmont-style dashboard was still crap, the most powerful V8 only made 140 horsepower, and the nasty turbocharged four-cylinder made even less. Still, this Mustang was a sign that the “Malaise” era might not last forever.

Indeed, it didn’t last. The 1982 Mustang GT added a four-barrel carb to the 302 and increased power up to 157 horsepower. Yeah, that still doesn’t sound like much, but it was just the beginning.

By 1987, the GT had 225 fuel-injected horses under the horse’s hood, even if it was covered in a bit too much eighties tinsel than some might have liked.

The swansong of the Fox was the vaunted SVT Cobra that pumped 235 horsepower through a 5-speed manual to achieve a sub-six-second zero to sixty (remember, the car weighed only 3300 pounds). Upgraded wheels, brakes, and suspension were matched with a stripped-down exterior that probably looked a lot like what Jack Telnack had secretly envisioned for the original 1979 model. The Mustang had come full circle, and the “Malaise” era was now well and truly over.

The love for the Fox body continues to grow over the years; it’s a Mustang that can easily be upgraded and modified to something surprisingly formidable. It’s an icon of affordable performance for buyers of many age groups in the time when early Mustangs started to become out of reach. Despite that, it’s the old 1960s car that Ford has chosen to copy over and over again since 2005. Isn’t it time to move the nostalgia curve up a few years?

FX Or Effed Up?

What’s the next stop on the timeline for a new retro Mustang, then? Part of me wants to see a modern version of the Mustang that came after the one that the current S650 is mimicking. Sadly, the rather unfair “too big” stigma attached to this 1971-73 “big” Mustang makes this a less-than-ideal muse (I’m probably still going to do one, though). The next car on the timeline is, of course, the Pintostang. As much as I don’t want to be a basic hater, I really can’t condone doing a retro version of the poor Mustang II; I did one as a joke a few years back and you can see why I say this.

That leaves the 1979 “Fox” as the best candidate for the retro treatment. I wouldn’t be the first. A few weeks ago, Ford showed us a version of the current Mustang edition called the “FX” that was supposed to be a tribute to GenXer’s favorite decade.

In truth, it’s more early nineties in feel than Culture Club-era vibe, and while some of our readers seemed to like it, many more felt that it was a low-effort attempt at nostalgia. Mind you, any time a brand makes a car in an Actual Color today I have to applaud it, but this limited edition is definitely more of a factory high-quality “Pimp My Ride” project than a retro tribute. The bigger issue seems to be that while the vibrant green paint hue, very un-Mustang-like white wheels, and odd, white-painted grille details make this a great car to complement your Hypercolor shirt, this “FX” edition doesn’t even remotely say “Fox body” to anyone.

Naturally, you can’t realistically make a 2025 car that’s modeled off a 1967 car appear to be a crisp, angular design from the eighties. The question a reader named Shooting Brake asked was, what if they did make a new Mustang that was an unabashed tribute to the now-appreciated third-generation Ford pony car?

The Boss Is Back

Our Thomas Hundal was the one who wrote about that Mustang FX edition, and his observations on doing throwback cars were insightful:

Going retro can be a digital tightrope walk if the goal on the other side is automotive mass appeal. Smear it on with a trowel, and the internet will call it heavy-handed. Waft its general scent across the room, and the internet will say it doesn’t go far enough.

The internet is indeed passing judgment on the FX, and many Foxstang fans feel this thing falls into the second category. My guess is that, for the sake of comparison, our readers would like to see the “smear it on” end of the spectrum, so I’ll grab my tub of Industrial Retro and drywall tools. You want near-cartoonish retro? I’ll Push It To The Limit like Pacino in a white suit.

A ways back, our man Adrian Clarke followed the traditional, correct way to sketch up a concept of a modern Fox body which you really should check out by clicking here. Naturally, I’m only interested in doing things the “wrong” way, so that’s what you’re gonna get. I’ll start with a new S650 in the most dull silver grey I can find, sitting at an everyday Oklahoma Ford dealer. No, I don’t want color or glitz to do any heavy lifting (or really any lifting at all) to make our retro Fox. If it doesn’t work in this everyday American environment, to me it doesn’t work at all. Also, I get the feeling from the room that you don’t want subtle nods to the past or an abstract modern interpretation that looks sort of like a Fox if you squint. For better or worse, they want a 2008 Challenger-style rehash, so that’s what I have to give you.

I’ve kept the same wheelbase and essentially the same length, and overlayed the Fox body shape on it. The rub strip that continues 360 degrees around the 1979 Fox is gone, but I’ve kept that character line as well as the one that sits just below the beltline. I’ve always liked the nose on the first Fox with the sunken lights and black grille; I’ll copy that here, but of course there will be projector lights under clear covers instead of exposed sealed beam bulbs. Driving lights, as on the last Fox GTs and Cobras, will sit in the front spoiler, with hidden slots around them to let in air to cool the front brakes.

Truthfully, I followed most of the original car verbatim, and it seems to work. Hey, we need 20″ versions of those SVT Cobra “fanblade” wheels that a number of commenters seemed to like as well, right? You can see the bizarre crap that I did in the animation below. I’d likely need more of a “power bulge” on the hood to clear the motor, but that would still look good:

Let me guess what you’re going to say next. “I’d like to see a really subtle power bulge, and while you’re at it, please do it up as a performance version by a tuner like Saleen.” I can read your Fox’n minds. Here you go:

The most significant change from the S650 is that while the roof is essentially the same height on this Retro Fox, it doesn’t slope down nearly as dramatically to the back of the car as on the 2025 version. Keeping faithful to the original Fox’s styling has an added benefit; take a look here at the back seat of the current S650 with the “butt pits” and steeply raked glass over where the hopefully headless rear occupants sit.

Now look at the back seat of a Fox body. It’s almost like a normal car. Do you see “butt pits” needed for passenger’s scalps to clear the headliner?  No, you don’t, because it doesn’t have any; the Fox has cathedral-like space in back compared to the latest Mustang.

Hell, as kids you probably remember sitting three across in the back of the Foxstang your homie Mike’s mom drove (she was the one with feathered hair who smoked Camel Lights, so you kinda had a crush on her). Cargo space with the rear seats down on the Fox was also quite good for a sporting machine.

Smoked-out LED tributes to SVT-style taillights (they were actually repurposed SVO units on the SVT) sit below the hatchback opening that always made the Fox such a practical proposition. That rear diffuser from the S650 doesn’t look too out of place on the old school design. A subtle rear spoiler would indeed be able to drain so that it won’t create a bird bath. Note that the fenders flare out slightly under that below-beltline character line, sort of like the bulges on the Mercury Capri version of the old Fox.

Here’s an animation between the trunk-lidded S650 and the RetroFox hatchback. It’s obviously a boxier and ostensibly more practical shape, no wonder Ford went this direction in the late seventies to make the ‘Stang more relevant as a “real car.”

Inside, I’ll use the dashboards from the Mustang II and the early Fox on this redux as inspiration (and not the late eighties version of the Fox).

I’d like to rehash an idea that I’ve already shown on the strange gag-post Mustang II revival I did some time ago (since that has a very similar dash to the 1979-86 Fox).  You see, a big slab-like dashboard is ideal for screens, and unlike the current Mustang (and most cars), we’re enclosing these screens within the padded dashboard and not propped up like a home computer monitor.

Our retro ‘Stang can use this wide expanse to recreate a whole bunch of different looks for your instruments. For example:

Original: Looks like a 1965 dashboard

Classic: Copy of a 1968 dashboard

Heritage: Just like a 1974 Mustang II with woodgrain and an animated mechanical digital clock above the glove box. I love the idea of what looks like the dash from a bog-slow car in a thing that can do sub-five-second zero-to-sixty times.

Cobra II: As above, but silver engine-turned trim

Foxbox 1,2 and 3: Simulated 1979 instruments with your choice of woodgrain, black, or silver trim. You can even get an 85MPH speedometer that changes to a 160MPH gauge when you exceed 85.

Foxbox 4: Simulated 1987 instruments

Future 1 and 2: Modern digital style gauges. Also, the logo horse runs across the area above the glovebox on startup.

That’s almost like getting into a new car every day of the week if you wanted to. Programming would make it easy to make even more, and I can see someone like Steve Saleen making a new graphic layout for hot new Foxes he’d likely build up.

It’s all great fun, and the mechanicals from the S650 mean that you’re getting performance and handling that even the vaunted late-model Cobra Foxes couldn’t dream of.

Stop, Collaborate, And Listen

Let’s face it: many of us Autopians weren’t even alive when the Mustang that inspired the current S650 came out. However, you do remember looking out the snot-smeared windows from the back of your family’s station wagon or minivan at the lot of the local Ford dealership while Phil Collins played through the stereo. You were years away from having a license to drive the silver SVO or sinister black GT Fox Body ‘Stangs you saw sitting under the streamers, but you knew in the back of your mind that the day would come.

Fast forward forty years, and prices for surviving examples are on the rise; as with the first Mustang models, it’s sad to see cars originally famous for their affordability turn into costly keepsakes. Worse than that, if you drove one, you’d probably be disappointed that it wouldn’t be as quick off the line as your company Altima.

Maybe a modern reboot of the classic Mustang of our generation with the S650’s incredibly capable underpinnings would be just the ticket to get the sort of young-again feels that have made classics so popular with our Boomer parents for years. Make mine a triple white 5.0 convertible, please. Word to your mother.