It's a beautiful spring day, sun glinting off the Potomac, birds chirping, the whole bit. A standard-issue Honda Civic coasts through a crowded marina parking lot -- that spot's taken, that spot's taken, that spot . . . Whoa, what's this? A row of half a dozen Ford Mustangs appears: restored classics from the '60s and '70s, culminating in a brand-new 2005 model. The Civic driver stops and gets out. He stands, slack-jawed, staring at the menacing Mustangs. His Civic idles meekly behind him, door open, forgotten.
It would have been a great TV commercial as the scene played out half a dozen weeks ago at the Washington Sailing Marina in Alexandria. The impromptu car lust was exactly what Ford was hoping for when it rolled out the new Mustang last fall, and Americans have provided it in numbers even company executives didn't expect.
Sales are up 25 percent from last year. Ford has had to increase production, to 192,000, a 70 percent increase over last year. Like a Beatles album, the car is one of those rare products loved by critics as much as the public. The new Mustang proves that despite all the recent news about Detroit automakers stumbling financially, they can still get things right once in a while.
"This is the best Mustang ever produced," said Brad Barnett, who runs an enthusiasts' Web site called TheMustangSource.com. "It's all-American. Baseball, apple pie and Mustang are all-American."
Which makes it all the more remarkable that the new Mustang is largely the creation of a Vietnamese immigrant named Hau Thai-Tang.
At 38, Thai-Tang is younger than the car itself, which debuted in 1964. He and his family escaped from Vietnam as Saigon fell in 1975, and he hired on at Ford as an engineer shortly after college. Despite his unusual background, Thai-Tang was well aware of what was at stake when he landed the assignment as chief engineer on Ford's most iconic product. Or maybe it was because of his background.
"This car symbolizes so many things about America," he said. "There's so much made in the media these days of the stereotype of the ugly American overseas. But there are a lot of very positive images of America that don't get mentioned enough, and I think in many ways the Mustang embodies those things."
Qualities such as "strength, power, confidence, freedom and the sense of inclusiveness," he said, were always in mind as he oversaw decisions about how to design and build the new Mustang.
Sometimes it takes a distant vantage point to see America quite that way. After all, it was Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville who captured the spirit of American democracy in essays in the 1800s, and fellow countryman Frederic Auguste Bartholdi who created the great symbol of the Statue of Liberty. Think of the Eastern Europeans of the early 20th century who shaped American cinema -- Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer. Or French designer Raymond Loewy, who created the Greyhound Scenicruiser, the Shell and Exxon logos, the streamlined S-1 locomotive that was the pinnacle of 1930s railroading.
In the auto industry, it was another Asian American -- Larry Shinoda, held in internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II -- who designed the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray, arguably the top rival to the Mustang as the quintessential American car.
"There is probably a dynamic there that allows a -- for lack of a better word -- an outsider to express what all of us would like to say," said Wes Brown, an auto industry marketing expert with the consulting firm Iceology Inc. In the case of the new Mustang, he said, Thai-Tang "was able to express his love for everything American better than someone who was born here."
Thai-Tang knew war his whole childhood. His family was comfortable -- his father was a schoolteacher and South Vietnamese army conscript, his mother a clerk for Chase Manhattan Bank -- but their neighborhood in Saigon was no escape from combat. Viet Cong would infiltrate the city at night, he said; one morning the family opened their front door and found an enemy fighter shot dead on the stoop.
