1968 Ford Mustang GT Fastback in Lime Gold Green & Engine Sound

Cliff Batson calls himself a Chevy guy — but he’s owned this 1968 Ford Mustang GT Fastback in an unusual shade of Lime Gold since 1990, and it’s never left his garage. Under the hood is a drivetrain combo collectors still chase decades later, and the body shares its shape with the most famous car chase in movie history. Watch to find out why a self-described Chevy guy never let this Ford go.

Cliff Batson calls himself a Chevy guy. He has for as long as anyone who knows him can remember. So when a 1968 Ford Mustang GT Fastback in an unusual shade of green landed in his driveway in 1990, it should have been a short-term project, a car to flip and forget. Thirty-plus years later, he still has it, and the color everyone assumed would fade out of fashion within a few seasons is exactly why this particular Fastback still turns heads outside Phoenix. Some cars change the loyalties of the people who buy them. This is one of those stories.

A Chevy Guy Who Couldn’t Say No

By his own admission, Cliff Batson identifies as a Chevy guy, the kind of enthusiast whose garage history should be full of bowties, not blue ovals. But this 1968 Mustang GT Fastback, caught by My Car Story with Lou Costabile in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, broke that pattern the moment he saw it. Batson has owned the car since 1990, meaning it has now outlasted plenty of relationships people build their entire identities around — proof that a genuinely cool car can override brand loyalty, at least for one car in one Chevy fan’s collection.

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The Color Nobody Forgets

The Fastback wears Lime Gold, a paint code Ford offered for a limited window — commenters who remember the era note it was used for about four model years before Ford moved on to other greens. It is a color that reads differently depending on the light, shifting between a warm gold and a cooler green, and it stands out precisely because so few Mustangs from this era survive in anything but the expected reds, blacks, and blues. For a car built to blend into 1968’s muscle car crowd, Lime Gold makes sure this one never does.

The Drivetrain Combo Collectors Chase

Under the sheet metal, this Fastback carries what one commenter calls one of the most legendary combinations Ford ever built for the era: the Ford 9-inch rear end paired with a top-loader manual transmission. The 9-inch rear end in particular has a reputation that extends well beyond Mustangs — it is widely regarded among restorers and racers as one of the strongest, most rebuildable rear axles ever mass-produced, which is a big part of why so many 1960s Fords built with it are still being driven hard, rather than parked, more than fifty years later.

A Body Style Ford Got Right

1968 sits in the sweet spot of first-generation Mustang design, after the original 1965 debut but before the heavier restyle that arrived for 1969. Commenters single out the fastback’s proportions specifically, crediting Ford with nailing the lines and design cues for this particular model year in a way that later Mustangs, in their view, never quite matched. It is the kind of praise that gets repeated in nearly every comment section under a clean first-generation Fastback, and it is a large part of why cars like Batson’s continue attracting attention decades after their original production run ended.

The Bullitt Shadow Every 68 Fastback Lives Under

Any 1968 Mustang GT Fastback exists in the shadow of the most famous car chase in movie history — the Highland Green fastback Steve McQueen drove through the hills of San Francisco pursuing a Dodge Charger in Bullitt, released the same model year. One commenter, writing in Spanish, walks through the sequence in detail, describing it as one of the most memorable scenes ever filmed and calling this particular body style one of the most striking Mustangs Ford ever built. Batson’s Lime Gold car is a different color and trim from the movie car, but it shares the same fundamental shape that made that chase scene iconic.

A Manual Transmission Owner’s Delight

Commenters repeatedly single out the fact that this Fastback runs a genuine manual gearbox, calling it out as something increasingly rare to see driven and demonstrated on camera rather than parked in a collection. Hearing a period-correct four-speed run through its gears, paired with the original exhaust note, gives viewers a sense of what these cars actually felt like to drive new — something a static show car parked on a lawn can never fully communicate, and something Batson’s willingness to actually use the car makes possible.

Thirty Years and Counting

What ties the whole story together is time. Batson has owned this Fastback longer than many marriages last, longer than most people keep any single car, and long enough that the Chevy guy label has clearly become more habit than accuracy. For muscle car fans, longevity like that says more about a car’s real quality than any auction result ever could — this Mustang won over a skeptic in 1990 and never gave him a reason to let it go.

What It Takes to Keep One of These Running Right

Fastbacks from this era carry well-documented weak points that any serious owner eventually has to address, and Batson’s decades of ownership almost certainly means he has faced them. Rust tends to concentrate in predictable spots on first-generation Mustangs — the torque boxes, the shock towers, and the lower quarter panels are the areas restorers check first, since factory rustproofing in 1968 was minimal by modern standards. Engine choices that model year ranged from a base inline six up through the thundering 390 big-block, with the 302 V8 actually pulling GT-package duty as the factory standard before the 390 stepped in as the upgrade and the legendary 428 Cobra Jet arrived mid-year to rewrite the Fastback’s reputation on the street. Keeping a car like this one actually driven, rather than parked, means staying ahead of exactly those trouble spots rather than discovering them the hard way, which is part of why a genuinely sorted, unmolested example like Batson’s stands out from Fastbacks that look similar in photos but hide decades of deferred maintenance underneath.

Why This Particular Fastback Earns Its Own Story

Plenty of 1968 Mustang GT Fastbacks survive today in more common colors, with more predictable ownership histories, and most of them never generate the kind of attention this one has. What sets Batson’s car apart isn’t rarity of the model itself — Ford built these fastbacks in real volume — it’s the specific combination of an unusual factory color, a genuinely legendary drivetrain pairing, and more than three decades under one famously loyal-to-a-different-brand owner. Take away any one of those elements and this becomes a solidly nice, but largely unremarkable, survivor Mustang. Together, they turn a routine walkthrough into a story people actually want to watch to the end, which is exactly the kind of distinction that separates a forgettable car video from one that keeps earning views years after it was filmed.

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