T-minus two years: Mustang 50th anniversary celebration planning ...

Photo by Jeff Koch

To show just how much Mustang fans are looking forward to the 50th anniversary of the pony car, still two years away, the Mustang Club of America announced this week that it will coordinate a bi-coastal bash for the 2014 birthday celebration.

While previous Mustang anniversary celebrations have all taken place on the East Coast, the 2014 celebrations, scheduled for April 16-20, will take place at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and at Charlotte Motor Speedway in an effort to make the event accessible to as many Mustang fans as possible. According to the MCA, the events will be open to any Ford or Mustang enthusiast, including non-club members, and the club will organize what it calls ?pony trails? to caravan to either show from all over the country.

In addition to the MCA celebrations, Ford Motor Company itself is reportedly working on a 50th anniversary celebration similar to the automaker?s centennial celebration in 2003. Details on that have yet to be released.

Ford introduced the Mustang on April 17, 1964, at the New York World?s Fair. While the similarly sized Plymouth Barracuda, which was also aimed at a younger buyer, debuted a couple of weeks prior, on April 1, the Mustang became a runaway hit for Ford. The 22,000 Mustangs that Ford sold that first day nearly eclipsed the 23,443 Barracudas that Plymouth sold all that year; by the end of 1964, Ford moved more than 120,000 Mustangs, and after one full calendar year of sales, Ford totaled more than 400,000 Mustangs.

Its incredible popularity not only led to the proliferation of pony cars during the latter half of the 1960s, but also caused the American auto industry to re-align its priorities to focus on younger buyers. No wonder then that it has remained in production continuously through several generations and through great changes in the automotive industry over the past five decades.

For more information on the MCA celebrations, visit Mustang.org.

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