Re-Engineering the American Dream [p.2]

When servicemen came back to America they were fairly reckless. Once you are in the heat of battle and you come back, you have a different frame. They had a different frame of reference on what was dangerous. It was a twofold effort to build morale and promote the use of safety belts and some other th ings.

It was a pretty interesting experience to see the Mustang. It was a revolutionary product. The Mustang in the mid ‘60s fundamentally changed America’s perception of what a sports car was. Up until then, two-door vehicles were four-door cars with two left doors. The proportions weren’t different. The Mustang designers changed the proportions, which affected your perceptions of the car. They introduced the concept of a long-hood front deck, a long wheel base. The green house or the roof line was moved behind the center line of the vehicle. If it was revolutionary here, you can imagine the impact it had on us in Southeast Asia.

It really was very compatible with all of the positive images of America—a big powerful country, lots of open spaces, very confident. Certainly, you envision the concept of this car driving out west, somewhere, and this concept of freedom, inclusiveness. All these positive images were things that the Mustang embodied.

NHA: Did you ever imagine in your wildest dreams at that age that you would one day work on that very car?

HTT: No. My aspirations then were to just someday own a car. I didn’t have any dreams of coming to America, working for Ford or working on the Mustang.

The one point that I want to get across is that designing a car and manufacturing a car is a very complicated task. There are over 1500 new parts that had to be designed from scratch. You have to source it to a supplier. You have to ship it to an assembly plant. And they all have to show up at the right point in time in the build sequence. It was a collective effort of 200 plus people.

Certainly a lot of the credit belongs to the team, but I feel like part of my job as the person running the program is to set a very clear vision of what the car is about and make the right tradeoffs and concessions.

NHA: What is the difference between designing and engineering?

HTT: Designers have [the] responsibility for doing the styling. We also design, but we design components. For the layman, we would take the design and translate it into sheet metal and parts, engines and transmission.

NHA: Do you feel that your upbringing played a role in the creation of the new Mustang?

HTT: I think the one thing I really rallied around was this: What does the Mustang really embody? The concept of freedom and inclusiveness. Tat’s more than just the price point. It’s making sure that everyone feels good in a Mustang. That includes being seen in a Mustang, but it should also be a car that’s easy to drive.

Sometimes there’s a tendency, a machismo, to [driving] that says you have to be a racecar driver to drive it well. One of the things we wanted to do with the Mustang was to flatter a novice driver but reward a good driver. A sign of a good car to me is that anybody can get in it and feel good about their driving, that they’re a better driver than they actually are.

It’s everything from clutch actuation to pulling away from a stop sign without stalling the car and making them feel uncomfortable. And those are all very tangible product aspects that I tied back into “the Mustang” that I formulated at a very early age.

NHA: So what makes the new Mustang a “Mustang”?

HTT: I think everything. The styling is a large part of it. The stance of the car. When you work on an icon product like The Mustang, your immediate initial tendency is: “Here’s my chance to go down in history and make my mark on this car.” I think our team showed a lot of reverence for the brand. We realized really quickly that this is a car that’s been around for 40 years.

If you think of some of the people who worked on [the Mustang], they’re legends: Lee Iacocca, Carroll Shelby—real legends in the automotive industry. We knew this car was here before he got on it, and it’s going to be here long after we leave. The one thing that truly differentiates the Mustang from other products is that it has 41 years of heritage.

We tried to be really true to the brand, and had a lot of reverence for what the Mustang stands for. When we styled it, the last thing we wanted people to say was, “What is that?”

I’ll use the Charger as an example. If you saw a Charger driving down the street, and it didn’t have a badge on it that said Charger, very few people would make the connection and say that’s a Dodge Charger.