Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: When did Ford first produce the Mustang?
In 1964 Mustang sales started with 22,000 orders taken on the first day at the World's Fair and around the country. In the first two years of production, three Ford Motor Company plants in Milpitas, California; Dearborn, Michigan; and Metuchen, New Jersey produced almost 1.3 million Mustangs.
The Mustang's success left General Motors unprepared. Chrysler introduced the Plymouth Barracuda a few weeks before the Mustang, and although it was later redesigned as a distinct "pony car", it was initially a modified Plymouth Valiant. However, the "fish car" did not enjoy as strong a market demand as Ford's "pony". General Motors executives thought the rear-engined Chevrolet Corvair Monza would compete against the Mustang, but it also sold poorly by comparison. The Monza performed well, but lacked a V8 engine and its reputation was tarnished by Ralph Nader in his book Unsafe At Any Speed. It took GM until the 1967 model year to counter with the Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac Firebird. Lincoln-Mercury joined the competition in 1966 with the Mercury Cougar, an "upmarket Mustang" and subsequent "Motor Trend" Car of the Year. In 1967, American Motors (AMC) introduced the Javelin, an image changing "standout" four-place pony car. In 1969, the Dodge Challenger, a version of the Plymouth Barracuda platform, was last to join the pony car race. This genre of small, sporty automobiles is often referred to as the "pony car" because of the Ford Mustang that established this market segment.
Ford Motor Company operated the Mahwah Assembly plant from 1955, producing 6 million cars in the 25 years it operated before the last car rolled off the line on June 20, 1980. At the time of its completion, it was the largest motor vehicle assembly plant in the United States. The Ford plant, along with other businesses such as American Brake Shoe and Foundry Company, helped contribute to the economic development of the town and its reputation for low home property taxes. The Mahwah town sports teams remain named Thunderbirds in honor of the Ford plant.
The Lincoln Motor Company Plant, built in Detroit, Michigan, by Henry Leland in 1917, was closed after 1952; subsequent Lincolns were produced alongside Mercury Montereys and Mercury Montclairs. For the 1957 model year, Ford opened Wixom Assembly in Wixom, Michigan, as a facility to specialize in Lincoln production. From 1957 to 2007, the facility produced Lincoln vehicles nearly exclusively, along with the Ford GT and several generations of the Ford Thunderbird.
For the 1956 model year, Ford Motor Company created the Continental Division, slotted above Lincoln as the flagship marque of Ford Motor Company. At its launch, Continental introduced the Continental Mark II as its model line, intended as a successor to the 1940-1948 Lincoln Continental personal luxury car. Offered as a two-door hardtop coupe, the Mark II broke from a number of American styling precedents of the time. While fitted with whitewall tires, the exterior was fitted with minimal chrome trim on the body sides; tailfins were left off of the body completely. In place of the bumper-mounted spare tire of the original Lincoln Continental, the trunklid of the Mark II showcased the design element, with a large imitation spare tire bulge (which fit over the actual spare tire inside the trunk). The Mark II was largely hand-built, with extensive quality testing done to each engine and transmission before leaving the factory.
Lincoln Motor Company was founded in 1917 by Henry M. Leland, naming it after Abraham Lincoln; in 1922, Lincoln was acquired by Ford. Following World War II, Ford formed the Lincoln-Mercury Division, pairing Lincoln with its mid-range Mercury brand through 2010. In 2012, Ford rebranded the Lincoln division under its original name, Lincoln Motor Company. Originally founded as a freestanding division above Lincoln, Continental was integrated within Lincoln in 1959. The Continental-branded Mark Series was marketed through Lincoln starting in 1968, adapting the Lincoln name in 1986. The Lincoln star emblem is derived from a badge first used on the 1956 Continental Mark II.
For the 1983 model year, Ford underwent a major revision of its full-size and mid-size model ranges for both the Ford and Mercury divisions. Within Mercury, the Marquis was repackaged as its mid-size offering (replacing the Cougar sedan and wagon). While a redesigned Cougar returned solely as the counterpart of the Thunderbird, the Grand Marquis remained as the Mercury full-size sedan. For the first time since 1951, Mercury offered a single product line in the full-size segment.
Buick is one of the oldest automobile brands in the world and the oldest in the United States. (Autocar, founded in 1897, is the oldest motor vehicle manufacturer in the western hemisphere; while originally an automobile maker, Autocar now builds heavy trucks. Oldsmobile, also an early auto maker founded in 1897, is now defunct; Studebaker was founded in 1852, but did not begin producing automobiles until 1902; Ford produced his first car in 1896 but did not start the Ford Motor Co. until 1903, and during the period in between was involved with other automobile manufacturers such as Cadillac, founded in 1902).
Despite Hudson's racing success, the marketplace competition and fierce rivalry between Chevrolet and Ford was too much to save the small scale independent automaker. Hudson merged with Nash-Kelvinator Corporation in 1954 to become American Motors Corporation. The Hudson name was finally retired in 1957, as AMC transformed into Rambler. The Hornet name was used by AMC for their compact sedan from 1970 to 1977. When automakers began returning to racing venues as a form of advertising and industrial prowess, AMC was competitive in the drag racing scene with their AMX taking the SS/D class record for ten years, and successfully fielded the AMC Javelin in the Trans-Am Series winning the manufacturer trophies in 1970 and 1971. The AMC Matador was developed into a winner on the NASCAR circuits.
The first car race in Michigan took place on October 10, 1901 between Henry Ford and Alex Winton. The race track was owned by the Detroit Driving Club of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. It had been built in 1894 as a race track for horses. Fifty years later, in the small summer resort town of Petoskey, Michigan, 300 miles north of Detroit, the Petoskey Motor Speedway was born. The northern speedway came during the time of America's new post World War II craze with jalopy stock car racing. It was the same era that Parnelli Jones rose to fame. The track was a one-quarter mile, banked, dirt speedway located on a farm field, just south of Petoskey. For four years, 1954 through 1958, thousands of summer tourists and residents of northern Michigan attended the weekly races from June through September.
In March 1986, the design freeze for the project occurred, with an intended production start of mid-1989. The second-generation Lincoln Town Car would become the first domestic Ford vehicle engineered outside of the company and constructed by foreign suppliers, with International Automotive Design of Brighton, England handling the engineering, while Japan-based Ogihara Iron Works supplying all of the Town Car body panels from its own factory near the Wixom plant. To improve quality of prototypes, project managers broke from automotive industry precedent, requiring successive hand-built prototypes to be built to production-level quality to determine the locations and causes of specific issues of tooling and manufacturing. From 1988 to 1989, the Town Car would go from over a year behind its production date to two weeks ahead of schedule.
Cadillac is among the first automobile brands in the world, second in the United States only to fellow GM marque Buick. The firm was founded from the remnants of the Henry Ford Company in 1902. It was named after Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who founded Detroit, Michigan. The Cadillac crest is based on his coat of arms.
The Lincoln Motor Company was founded in August 1917 by Henry Leland and his son Wilfred. Among the founders of Cadillac, Leland had sold the company to General Motors in 1909, remaining on as an executive until 1917, when he left over a dispute with GM President William Durant. Naming Lincoln Motor Company after Abraham Lincoln, the first President for whom he ever voted (1864), Leland financed the company by securing a $10 million contract to build Liberty V12 aircraft engines, breaking ground on the Lincoln Motor Company Plant. To build the Liberty engines, Lincoln sourced parts from other manufacturers; along with cylinders produced by Ford, other parts were sourced from Buick, Cadillac, Marmon, and Packard. In total, 6,500 Liberty V12 engines were produced by Lincoln before the end of World War I ceased wartime production.
As Lincoln entered the 21st century, the brand underwent a major transition within the structure of Ford Motor Company. As Ford expanded its global automotive holdings during the 1980s and 1990s, it acquired Jaguar, Aston Martin, Land Rover, and Volvo Cars. To collectively manage its global luxury-vehicle holdings, in 1999, Ford organized Premier Automotive Group (PAG). The same year, the management of Lincoln-Mercury was shifted to the American headquarters of PAG, largely in an effort to engineer and market more competitive vehicles for the brand.
It was produced nearly exclusively as a four-door sedan, from 1975 to 1986, the Grand Marquis was also offered in a two-door body style. From 1979 to 1991, the wood-trimmed Mercury Colony Park station wagon was included as part of the model line.
The 2.0 litre version was a narrower-bore version of the original 2.3 liter "Lima" four. Bore and stroke are , respectively, for an overall displacement of . This engine was installed in the 1983-1988 Ford Rangers and in some Argentinian Ford Taunuses.The Ford Pinto used the OHC version, a 2.3 L (2301 cc) unit introduced in 1974 which has a bore and stroke. This version lasted until 1997 in various guises. The earliest units produced 66 kW (88 hp) and 160 N·m (118 lb·ft). This engine has also been known as the Lima engine, after the Lima Engine plant in Lima, Ohio, where it was first manufactured (it was also later manufactured in Brazil).
In August 1977, a facelifted version—codenamed within Ford as the "Transit "—but usually referred to as the Transit Mark II, debuted with a restyled, longer nose section which could now properly accommodate an in-line engine in place of the Essex and Cologne V4s - therefore the Pinto engine from the Cortina became the Transit's dominant power unit. Many fleet owners experienced premature camshaft wear in early Pinto units in the Cortina and for two years the Transit 75 was available with the 1.6 L Ford Kent cross-flow engine. High-performance versions intended for police or ambulance use used the 3.0 L V6 version of the Essex engine, Australian variants had 4.1 L (250 cu in) inline 6-cylinder engines. The new frontal styling brought the Transit back into line with the rest of Ford of Europe's passenger car range of the period with square headlamps and the black louvred grille, although the rear styling remained unaltered. The dashboard was also completely redesigned with a more comprehensive instrument cluster and switchgear taken from the Taunus/Cortina Mk.4.
Version one was based on Ford's 2.3-liter Pinto engine and weighed (vs. for its cast iron counterpart). It was designed to produce at 9200 rpm. It was composed of metal cylinder sleeves, metal combustion chamber tops, metal piston crowns, bearings, valves and seats, and a stock 2.3L Pinto crankshaft. Nearly everything else in the engine, including the block, rods and piston skirts, were made of glass reinforced Polyamide-imide thermoplastic resins manufactured at the time by Amoco Chemicals Co. The engine was never installed in a vehicle.
For 1949, all three Ford Motor Company divisions debuted their first postwar designs. Sharing its body structure with the Mercury Eight, the redesigned Lincoln model line (code-named the EL-series) marked the first use of a V8 in a Lincoln since 1932. An all-new V12 intended for Lincoln was stillborn in development, leading the division to adapt a Ford flathead V8 (from the Ford F-8 conventional truck). As with the previous Lincoln Continental, the 1949 Lincoln dispensed with running boards completely, moving on to abandon pontoon styling entirely, with a straight fender line (and low hoodline) from headlamp to taillamp. In a carryover from Zephyr-based Lincolns, the 1949 Lincolns retained rear-hinged passenger doors. As a flagship model of Lincoln, the Lincoln Cosmopolitan was styled with its own rear roofline.
As Lincoln entered the 1950s, Ford Motor Company sought to increase the differentiation between the Mercury and Lincoln model lines. For 1952, to add interest to the brand, Lincoln returned to model names for the first time since 1942, with the Lincoln Cosmopolitan becoming the standard Lincoln model, with the Lincoln Capri becoming the flagship model line. In a return to (small) pontoon rear fenders, Lincolns shared a body with the Mercury Monterey. Mechanically, Lincoln differed from Mercury, as the Ford truck V8 was replaced by the Lincoln Y-block V8 with a Hydramatic transmission. For the first time since the discontinuation of the Model K, Lincolns were produced with front-hinged rear doors.
During 1956, Lincoln-Mercury was reorganized slightly, following the creation of the free-standing Edsel and Continental divisions, Lincoln-Mercury was changed to Mercury-Edsel-Lincoln (MEL), with Edsel slotted alongside/below Mercury and Continental above Lincoln, as the flagship of all of Ford Motor Company. By the end of 1959, Continental was integrated into Lincoln and Edsel was withdrawn.
In 1911, Buick introduced its first closed-body car, four years ahead of Ford, but five years after Cadillac, which was the first. The car was built at the all-new factory in Flint which later became to be known as Buick City. Buick during the 1920s made various sized vehicles, with series designations for different years, sometimes using numbers, while later years using lettered designations. One of the larger vehicles, with straight-six, was the Buick Master Six.
The AOD (automatic overdrive) is a four-speed automatic transmission with overdrive. Introduced in 1980, it was Ford's first four-speed automatic overdrive transmission. The gearset design is based on the Ford "X" automatic transmissions used during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. The AOD replaced many of Ford's older transmissions such as the C4, C5, and light duty applications of the FMX.
It was used in many European Ford cars and was exported to the United States to be used in the Ford Pinto, a successful subcompact car of the 1970s, hence the name which is used most often for the unit. In Britain, it is commonly used in many kit cars and hot rods, especially in the 2 litre size.
The fourth generation Ford Mustang was an automobile produced by the American manufacturer Ford for the 1994 through 2004 model years. For 1994 the Ford Mustang underwent its first major redesign in fifteen years, being introduced in November 1993 and launching on December 9, 1993. The design, code named "SN-95" by Ford, was based on an updated version of the Fox platform. It featured styling by Bud Magaldi that incorporated some stylistic elements from the classic Mustangs. A convertible returned, but the notchback and hatchback bodystyles used in the earlier Mustangs were not available and now formed into a single fastback coupe bodystyle.
The 1967 model year Mustang was the first redesign of the original model. Ford's designers began drawing up a larger version even as the original was achieving sales success, and while "Iacocca later complained about the Mustang's growth, he did oversee the redesign for 1967 ." The major mechanical feature was to allow the installation of a big-block V8 engine. The overall size, interior and cargo space were increased. Exterior trim changes included concave taillights, side scoop (1967 model) and chrome (1968 model) side ornamentation, square rear-view mirrors, and usual yearly wheel and gas cap changes. The high-performance 289 option was placed behind the newer FE engine from the Ford Thunderbird, which was equipped with a four-barrel carburetor. During the mid-1968 model year, a drag racer for the street could be ordered with the optional Cobra Jet engine which was officially rated at all of these Mustangs were issued R codes on their VINs.
The 1969 Shelby Mustang was now under Ford's control and made to look vastly different from regular production Mustangs, despite now being built inhouse by Ford. The custom styling included a fiberglass front end with a combination loop bumper/grille that increased the car's overall length by , as well as five air intakes on the hood. Two models were available, GT-350 (with a 351 cu in (5.8 L) Windsor (351W) producing ) and GT-500 (with the 428 cu in (7.0 L) Cobra Jet engine), in both sportsroof or convertible versions. All 1969–1970 Shelby Mustangs were produced in 1969. Because of dwindling sales, the 789 remaining 1969 cars were given new serial numbers and titled as 1970 models. They had modified front air dam and a blackout paint treatment around the hood scoops.
The Ford Mustang has arguably been Ford's most successful sports car. Jerry Titus won the 1965 SCCA Pro B National Championship with a Mustang and the model went on to earn Ford the SCCA Trans-Am Championship title in both 1966 and 1967. Ford won the Trans-Am Championship again in 1970 with Parnelli Jones and George Follmer driving Boss 302 Mustangs for Bud Moore Engineering. Ford took the 1985 and 1986 IMSA GTO Championship with Mustangs driven by John Jones and Scott Pruett before returning to Trans-Am glory with a championship in 1989 with Dorsey Schroeder. Ford dominated Trans-Am in the 1990s with Tommy Kendall winning championships in 1993, 1995, 1996, and 1997 with Paul Gentilozzi adding yet another title in 1999. In 2005 the Ford Mustang FR500C took the championship in the Rolex Koni Challenge Series in its first year on the circuit. In 2007, Ford added a victory in the GT4 European Championship. 2008 was the first year of the Mustang Challenge for the Miller Cup, a series which pits a full field of identical factory-built Ford Mustang race cars against each other. Also, in 2008, Ford won the manufacturers championship in the Koni Challenge Series and HyperSport drivers Joe Foster and Steve Maxwell won the drivers title in a Mustang GT.