Plymouth Beat Ford to America’s First Pony Car by 16 Days — Then Watched the Mustang Outsell It in a Single Day

Plymouth had a sporty fastback on sale before the Mustang even existed, complete with the biggest curved window Detroit had ever tried to build and a trunk big enough for a pair of skis. Here’s how beating Ford to market turned into one of the pony car era’s strangest footnotes.

Plymouth beat Ford to the punch by sixteen days — and it still lost the war before anyone outside Detroit knew it had started. On April 1, 1964, dealers quietly began selling a fastback built on the humble Valiant chassis, wrapped in the largest single piece of curved glass ever fitted to a production car. It had a fold-down rear seat that opened into a seven-foot cargo hold, a name borrowed from a predatory fish, and a shot at inventing an entire market segment. Then, on April 17, Ford unveiled the Mustang at the New York World’s Fair, and by Ford’s own account sold roughly 22,000 of them on day one alone — nearly matching everything Plymouth would sell of the Barracuda across its entire first year. This is the story of the car that got there first and still finished second.

The Fish That Almost Roared

Uncle Tony’s Garage lays out the case plainly in a video built around a simple, uncomfortable fact for Mopar fans: the Barracuda wasn’t a rushed answer to the Mustang. It was first. Plymouth built it on the existing Valiant platform specifically to get a sporty compact to market fast and cheap, and the plan worked — right up until Ford’s marketing machine turned the Mustang launch into a cultural event. The video walks through why a car with a genuine head start ended up as a footnote, and it doesn’t let Plymouth off easy for the mistakes that let that happen.

The channel’s commenters, many of them owners or former Mopar mechanics, fill in the details that make the story land: fold-down rear seats that made the Barracuda genuinely useful, a 318 or 273 under the hood that could embarrass a Camaro or a 442 on a Saturday night, and a back glass that baked anyone sitting underneath it on a summer afternoon. One commenter, who said he owned the car new, called the ski-pass-through design “a very progressive design” decades ahead of its time for a car in this price range. Another remembered a 65 Formula S with a 273 and a four-speed that “gave the Camaros and Mustangs a fit on Saturday night street races” once the right axle and gearing went in.

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A Pony Car Built From a Family Sedan

The Barracuda’s origin story is unglamorous by design. Plymouth needed a sporty compact and didn’t have years or a blank-check budget to build one from scratch, so it grafted a fastback roofline and that enormous curved rear window onto the existing Valiant body. The glass alone was reportedly around 14.4 square feet — big enough that period reports describe Plymouth’s glass supplier struggling to hold the intended shape in production, leaving the finished window with more of a gentle bubble than the showroom mockups promised. Early print ads are said to have been retouched to make the glass look flatter and smoother than it actually was on the production cars sitting in dealer lots.

What that glass bought the car was practicality nobody expected from a sporty two-door in 1964. The rear seat folded flat, the trunk lid opened into the cabin rather than staying sealed off, and the combination created roughly seven feet of continuous cargo space — enough, as period ads liked to point out, to load a pair of skis without removing them from the car. It was a genuinely clever piece of packaging wrapped around a car that, underneath the sheet metal, was still mostly Valiant: same basic unibody, same running gear, same six-cylinder base engine that did nothing to suggest “muscle car” to anyone cross-shopping a Mustang.

The performance case took a little longer to arrive. The high-output 273 cubic-inch “Commando” V8 — a 235-horsepower unit that finally gave the Barracuda real teeth — didn’t show up until late in the 1964 calendar year and became a proper factory option for the 1965 model year, bundled into a new Formula S package that added heavy-duty springs and shocks, a thicker sway bar, wide Goodyear Blue Streak tires, a dash-mounted tachometer, and rally stripes with “Formula S” medallions ahead of the front wheel openings. It worked exactly as intended, but Plymouth built only 2,994 of them out of 58,709 total Barracudas for 1965 — a performance option most buyers never checked the box for. Until the Commando arrived, Plymouth was selling a fast-looking car that mostly wasn’t fast yet, while Ford was already offering buyers a 289-cubic-inch V8 in the Mustang from day one.

Sixteen Days Early, and It Still Wasn’t Enough

The brutal part of the timeline is the sales math. Plymouth moved 23,443 Barracudas across the entire 1964 model year. Ford’s Mustang, launched barely two weeks later with a dedicated platform, a saturation marketing campaign, and a debut at the World’s Fair in front of the national press, reportedly sold close to 22,000 cars on its first day on sale. Being first to market meant almost nothing when the second car in showed up with a far bigger budget behind it and a name that would come to define the entire pony car era. Mustang went on to sell more than 400,000 units in its first twelve months; the Barracuda spent its whole debut year chasing a number Ford nearly matched before lunch on launch day.

That gap is really the whole story. The Barracuda wasn’t a bad car — the fold-down seat, the big glass, and later the 273 Commando and Formula S package made it a genuinely interesting machine that still has a loyal following today. It just launched into a fight it didn’t know it was in, against a company that understood exactly how to make a car launch feel like an event. Plymouth had the better footnote. Ford had the better headline.

It’s worth remembering just how little separated the two cars on paper. Both were compact-based two-doors with long hoods, short decks, and sporty fastback or notchback styling aimed at the same young, budget-conscious buyer. Both offered a six-cylinder base engine and an optional V8. The difference wasn’t engineering — it was timing, budget, and the sheer scale of Ford’s rollout, which put Mustangs in front of more eyeballs in one week than Plymouth managed in months of regional dealer advertising. History rewarded the company that understood marketing was part of the product, not an afterthought bolted on once the car was built.

How the Underdog Eventually Caught Up

Plymouth didn’t walk away from the fight, even if it took years to land a real punch. A 1967 redesign finally gave the Barracuda its own identity instead of borrowed Valiant panels, splitting the lineup into a notchback, a fastback, and a convertible, and widening the engine bay enough to accept Chrysler’s big-block V8s for the first time. It still wasn’t enough to out-muscle the Mustang or the newly arrived Camaro in the showroom numbers, but it set up the car for the version most enthusiasts actually picture when they hear the name.

That version arrived for 1970, when Plymouth moved the Barracuda onto the all-new E-body platform it shared with the Dodge Challenger — a chassis built from the ground up with a wide engine bay and a wheelbase tuned for muscle-car proportions rather than Valiant-derived compromise. For the first time, buyers could order a Barracuda with a 426 Hemi or a 440 Six Pack, and the resulting ‘Cuda became one of the most sought-after muscle cars Detroit ever built, with surviving Hemi convertibles now trading for seven figures at auction. The car that lost the sales race to the Mustang in 1964 spent the next six years quietly building toward the version that would outlast the argument entirely.

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