Owner of a '97 Cobra, I typically agree, but I think the front fascia and
hood of the Cobra models set it off and made it a bit more aggressive, more
like a Mustang.

But, yes, the '94-98 models were my least favorite since the '71-78 era of
either bloated cars or Pintoesque cars.  I know some here love both, but
they're just not for me.

JS

You're hearkening back to a time when automotive design didn't give a damn
about aerodynamics (or fuel efficiency, for that matter - goes hand in
hand). You're also talking about a Mustang that was born in whole from a
different car and given new sheet metal that spawned in turn a wholly new
breed. (Long hood, short deck.)

By the time OPEC had turned off the spigot in '73, Ford had to do the very
same thing with the Pinto, turning it into the Mustang II. The II was much
rounder than its predecessors (I owned a '74 coupe and a '78 hatchback),
even though Ford made every attempt to continue the classic Mustang lines.
All of a sudden, aerodynamic shape was important, and every gallon of gas
spent fighting the wind was a gallon of gas lost. Purely from a fleet point
of view, it's almost impossible to recapture the designs of previous
decades.

In '79, again, the Mustang took off from another car that was definitely not
a Mustang. It "evoked" the classic Mustang lines, but it was a leap away.
Some elements of the classics were involved, but it almost seemed that Ford
gave up on keeping to the "look" of the Mustang.

Now - I liked the II from the start. The Fox had to grow on me (hell, it was
a stinkin' Fairmont, for god's sake), but I ended up owning four of them. I
bought TFrog, precisely because the redesign in '94 disappointed me.

Like you, I wasn't smitten with the '94-'98 models, although they can't be
anything but Mustangs. The tweak in '99, that brought back the sharp edges,
was, I thought, a winner.

Now this new 2005 model... ohmigod. Again, it can't be anything but a
Mustang, and many of the classic elements are there. Kudos to Ford.

While much of the automotive industry has gone for a one-size-fits-all
approach, making it hard to tell one brand from another, the Mustang keeps
coming out in a design that couldn't be anything else. You see one, you know
immediately what it is.

Liked the II, didn't care for the Fox, didn't like the SN95 at all, came
back around in '99, flat-out love the '05. Is it the angular lines? A
distorted memory?

When someone says "Corvette", do you think early models or 2005? There's a
car that has gone through similar permutations over the years, but you could
pick any model year and it could only be a Corvette. You could never confuse
it with any other car. Some folks are 60's purists, some are partial to the
sharks, some like the 80's, some say the latest models are the absolute
best.

When a car has a lineage, you find that different people stop at different
points in the evolution. This is becoming increasingly obvious at Mustang
shows, where Mustangs are segregated by design. At shows like Nashville, the
classics were on one side, everything else on the other, except for the IIs,
who didn't know where to park.

(One wonders - given another 10 or 20 years, will the IIs work their way
into the classic parking lot?)

Sorry for rambling...

dwight