Ford expected the new Mustang to sell 100,000 units in its first year — buyers blew past that mark in under three months. This gallery traces the first-generation Mustang from its record-breaking 1964 debut through the Boss 302 era, with a surprising twist: the launch year wasn’t even the Mustang’s best-selling one. See which model year actually topped the charts.
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The Ford Mustang is responsible for creating a new pony class of vehicle. The Mustang is a sports car on a compact car frame. There were more than one million of them leave the assembly line in the first eighteen months of production. The original target of 100,000 vehicles the first year was surpassed by the third month of sales . As the trend of the time changed, the Mustang becomes heavier, larger and more luxuriously equipped to meet consumer demands. The G1 Mustang is available in a large number of variations including the Boss 302 and the Boss 429 for performance. The “Grande” was a luxurious trim option  available from 1969 and features a softer ride with 55 lbs. (24,9 kg) of soundproofing to cut out road noise.
1968 California Special
 
1969 Mach I
Ford engineers privately hoped the new pony car might sell 100,000 units in its debut year, a modest target for a company still nervous about a totally new class of vehicle. They blew past that number in less than three months. What happened next reshaped the entire American auto industry and created a car segment that didn’t exist before April 1964. By the time the dust settled on the Mustang’s first eighteen months, the sales figures looked less like a car launch and more like a cultural event. How big did it actually get, and which year turned out to be the biggest of them all?
A Launch Nobody Predicted
When the Mustang debuted on April 17, 1964, Ford’s own sales team had forecast around 100,000 units for the first year. Buyers crushed that projection within three months, and Ford had accepted 22,000 orders at the New York World’s Fair alone on debut weekend. By the end of the 1965 model year, Ford had sold 680,989 Mustangs, and the one-millionth example rolled off the line within two years of launch — a pace that made it, at the time, the most successful vehicle debut since the Model A nearly four decades earlier.
The Biggest Year Wasn’t the First One
Surprisingly, the launch year wasn’t even the Mustang’s best. That distinction belongs to 1966, when Ford moved roughly 607,500 units, followed by 1965 at 559,500 and 1967 at about 472,000. The Mustang’s runaway success single-handedly created the “pony car” segment: sporty, long-hood, short-deck coupes and convertibles built on more affordable compact platforms, a formula every domestic manufacturer scrambled to copy through the rest of the decade.
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1964 1/2 – ’73 is NOT 1st gen. 1964 1/2 – ’66 is 1st gen. ’67 – ’68 is 2nd gen. ’69 – ’70 is 3rd gen. and ’71 – ’73 is 4th gen. There are those who lump ’64 1/2 – ’68 as 1st gen and that one I can understand because of the similarities between them, but technically that’s wrong. They may all share the Falcon chassis, but aside from some details that’s it. Too include the ’71 – ’73 in there is ludicrous. That’s like calling all the Chargers made from ’66 to ’74 all the same gen.
Breaking it down:
1964 1/2 – ’66 – 1st gen
1967 – ’68 – 2nd gen
1969 – ’70 – 3rd gen
1971 – ’73 – 4th gen
1974 – ’78 – 5th gen
1979 – ’93 – 6th gen
1994 – 2004 – 7th gen
2005 – ’12 – 8th gen
2013 – now – 9th gen