How Ford Could Make A Mad Max Falcon Instead Of A Four-Door Mustang

“One day blurring into another? You’re a scavenger, Max. You’re a maggot. Did you know that? You’re living off the corpse of the old world. Tell me your story, Max.”

For many traditional car people, the future looks bleak. Self-driving cars. Manual transmissions eliminated. Fuel-burning engines banned. These are all hot buttons of discussion for any automotive enthusiast, and there’s a new one that’s popped up again recently: the idea of a four-door Mustang.

Once exclusively a two-door machine, the Dodge Charger reemerged in 2006 as a sedan to help increase the market share of one of the few remaining “normal” cars. Combined with the Mach-E becoming a generally accepted commodity, it’s only natural that a sedan version of America’s first pony car is being considered. Just because they can make a four-door ‘Stang doesn’t mean that they should, but if they don’t, what other approach could they take to get the desired result of more sales? I have an idea.

“I’m Scared Fifi…It’s That Rat Circus Out There”

The idea is hardly new. Ford actually proposed doing a four-door Mustang even before the release of the original two-door, if dated photos from the Ford studio are to be believed:

Personally, I’m open to the four-door idea if that’s the only way to save the pony car, but I’m not really a fan of the prospect of a Mustang sedan, as Ford has proven that this can be a slippery slope that leads to a cliff.

The Ford Thunderbird started as a two-seater and quickly changed to a four-seater, albeit still in a two-door configuration. In 1967, Ford went even further by adding a four-door model. From this point on, the T-Bird was never really the same; the four-door body style only lasted a few years, but the once-sporting car was now a luxobarge.

The Mercury Cougar began as the Mustang’s swankier twin in 1967 but changed by the late seventies to include not only a four-door body style but a station wagon model as well. Like the Thunderbird, the die was cast for an untimely death; despite later attempts to revive the name as something more enthusiast-oriented it now exists only in the history books.

It’s not like Ford doesn’t have plenty of other great nameplates to unearth and place onto a four-door muscle car. You may remember that I once proposed having the Mustang Mach-E made into a sinister-looking Torino instead.

In a post a few weeks back about this rumored, upcoming four-door full-four-seat Mustang, a few commenters said that a ‘Stang “sedan” is really kind of a “Ford Falcon” considering that the mechanicals of that car are what begat the original 1964 ½ Mustang.

Introduced for 1960, Ford’s first compact car was highly successful, but even those who championed the Falcon like Lee Iacocca readily admitted in print that it was possibly the least interesting car in all of automotive history. If you’re a GenXer or a little older, you likely think of a Falcon as something your school librarian drove. Even the two-door versions like the ones above and below were dull as hell.

So, anything with the Falcon nameplate that Ford made will be considered a crashing bore, right? Not even close.

“My World Is Blood And Fire”

If anyone outside of Detroit understood how to take a milquetoast sedan and turn it into a fierce machine, it was the Australians. When emissions controls and safety equipment started to kill the muscle car in America, the Big Three divisions Down Under really carried the torch for the next decades on the roads of their vast expanses of empty wilderness.

Ford Australia took that dull-looking American Falcon and created the 1971 HO Phase III you see below. To someone from the states, it looks at first glance like your Aunt Katie’s car with some custom stripes, lights, and wheels. I can assure you it was much, much more.

With a reported 350-plus horsepower out of the four-barrel 351 V8, a GTHO in street trim hit 142 MPH in a Wheels magazine test, a speed at which it could maintain all day long as proved by the testers dispensing with 200 miles in well under two hours. A win at the Bathurst Mount Panorama circuit was only one of its many victories in Australia’s punishing competition venues.

You’ll notice that the GTHO is very much a four-door car; we’ve talked before about how the Australians have little difficulty in making four-door sedans into performance cars, possibly even preferring them to coupes. This doesn’t mean they were opposed to two doors; the Falcon which replaced the GTHO’s body style (first called the XA in 1972 and then XB the following year) was offered in a four-door sedan and slick-looking hardtop coupe flavors, designed in part by Fox Mustang/Taurus man Jack Telnack during his stint with Ford Down Under:

As cool as these look, does anyone outside of Australia really know about these rather rare cars? They might not have if it weren’t for a series of films starting in 1979 about a dystopian future that featured a rather dramatically restyled XB coupe. If you were a kid in the early eighties surrounded by horrible malaise cars and saw this thing pop up on your television screen in trailers for The Road Warrior, you just sort of sat there with your jaw on the floor. You can hear this picture below, can’t you?

Sure, you loved the Nightrider Trans-Am and A-Team Van, but this thing Falcon was terrifyingly badass; it sort of made Steve McQueen’s Bullitt Fastback seem like a Tempo by comparison. Dubbed the “last of the V8 Interceptors” in the films, the design of this modified Mad Max Falcon looked somehow more resolved than the typical “Death Race 2000”-style “kustom kars” featured in such movies. Even to a kid, it looked almost like a factory job done by a Ford professional; it turns out that it was.

Aussie car designer Peter Arcadipane’s illustrious career included stints at GM, Mitsubishi and Mercedes, where he is credited with the rather lovely C215 CL coupe. As a lad, he worked for Ford Australia on a Falcon panel van-based show car called the Concorde. When Ford decided not to produce it, Arcadipane left to create his own company that made fiberglass body kits to let Falcon owners replicate the concept:

Look at that thing! You thought seventies car concepts in America were wild? Peter Arcadipane said “hold my Fosters, mate!”

Another observation: I readily admit that I have no idea what I’m talking about, but to me that front end looks remarkably similar in form to the 1979 Mustang that Arcadipane’s boss at Ford was responsible for when he returned to the states.

One of these “shovel nose” Arcadipane aftermarket components made its way onto the Mad Max movie Falcon, making it look like a car of the not-so-distant future. It works even better on that coupe than the van and is almost certainly more aerodynamic than the downward-facing grille of the stock XB.

Spoilers and roof-mounted airfoil complete the customization, first seen in the 1979 film in pristine form. By the second film, the apocalypse has reduced Australia to a wasteland, but the Interceptor looks even more menacing now that the gloss has long since left the black paint.

Replicas like this one abound today, and are even imported to America.

Somebody is almost certainly going to make a Dukes of Hazzard General Lee replica out of the latest Dodge Charger, so Ford should counter with something equally as nostalgic and far better: a new XB Falcon-inspired sedan based on the Mustang chassis. Now we can effectively have our four-door Mustang without shitting on the hallowed name of an American institution. We’ll have something as cool if not much cooler and unarguably much more practical at the same time. Ripper!

“You Want To Get Out Of Here, You Talk To Me”

Before we start with our XB Falcon tribute sedan, you might have a question: wasn’t the Mad Max car a coupe? Indeed it was, but as we’ve already said the Australians have no problem with a muscle sedan; neither should we. The legendary larger-than-life Peter Brock (think Crocodile Dundee as a race driver) won countless Bathurst victories in four-door cars; he’d beat your ass in any coupe you’ve got and then steal your girl.

I’ve seen numerous Photoshop renderings of four-door Mustangs, and most ignore that you’ll have to both raise the roof line and increase the wheelbase to make anything close to a usable sedan out of the pony car. You’ll also have a pretty worthless trunk for a five-passenger vehicle. All of these reasons are why a Falcon sedan makes so much sense, as the rendering below shows:

Yes, I took the shape of the XB almost verbatim while keeping the rocker panel detailing from the Mustang, mixing a bit of old with new. A strip of daytime running lights at the top of each headlight unit tops off the area below with projector lamps. Notice that I made a subtle nod to the Mad Max Interceptor’s side exhaust pipes with optional abstract tailpipes on each rocker panel. Yes, that’s silly.

Here’s the Mustang to overlay so you can see the length change, among other things:

At the rear, the XB’s triple-bar taillights were rather similar to the American Mustang but with amber indicators in the center (which also worked as reversing lights in Australia back in the day). We’ll copy that here on the new Interceptor but add a bit of the concavity of the lights on the latest Mustang to the shape.

Once again, an animation to show how it compares to America’s favorite (and still two door) pony car:

The XB Falcon might have had a trunk lid, but we’re going to add a massive hatchback to our Interceptor that extends down to the bumper, making this muscle machine ultra practical with room for all of your Costco paper products. Fold the rear seatbacks down and there’s very few flat screen TVs, IKEA bookcases, or mountain bikes that you couldn’t carry home. You can choose between rear buckets or a bench with tethers for you to fit up to three baby seats across.

There are plenty of reasons not to buy a street monster with rear wheel drive and a 600 horsepower V8, but cargo and passenger impracticality ain’t one of them with the new Interceptor.

The movie car was so trashed inside that it was hard to tell, but the XB Falcon had a rather distinctive dashboard that angled on the ends to surround the driver.

We’ll do the same thing here with a three-part screen, including one in front of the driver that could be configured to look like the original XB’s instrument layout. I envision one option for gauge display similar to the old XB with the secondary gauges aligned across the top of the binnacle. Mustang steering wheel, handbrake, door controls and more are shared. Honeycomb pattern similar to what’s used above the taillights (and on many early seventies Ford performance products) hides the climate control face level vents.

More than likely, the new Interceptor would be primarily automatic transmission (if not automatic only), but we can still have some fun with it. You might remember that Mad Max’s Interceptor had an odd supercharger that could be disconnected with a red button on the manual transmission gear selector shaft.

The “Sport Mode” or “Competition Mode” of shift points could be engaged on our new Interceptor by a similar red button mounted to the back of the automatic’s gear shift. We’ll also do a row of mock “competition” style switches on the console, though only a few of them (for things like traction control disable) will actually be lift-the-cover type; the others you just push the cover to activate them.

Also, the “door” over the phone garage (with charging pad) is a screen that will primarily show a clock as a shout out to many of the ultra-cool Fords from the seventies (particularly European ones like Capris) that had a prominent timepiece at the end of the console behind the shifter.

I haven’t talked about engines, but that’s rather irrelevant; whatever gasoline powerplants the Mustang can spare will fit under the hood (and if they don’t fit, we’ll happily put a bulge on the hood). I would like to see a supercharged supercar version just for good measure. Don’t worry: it will be fast.

If the Mustang is meant to compete with the latest two-door Dodge Chargers, the Interceptor would go head to head with Charger four-door models. The Interceptor should compare favorably to the Charger sedan six-cylinder model or the electric version of this Dodge that features special noise generators and vibration simulators to mimic Chargers from days of yore. In my new Interceptor, these kinds of sounds and shaking would be created by a time-tested system that uses cylinders with synchronized small explosions in each one, pumping though tuned tubes exiting out the back of the car. I like that type of rumble maker much better.

You want an EV? Go drive the Mustang Mach-E; it really is a nice car and a great entry into the segment. The Interceptor? Well, as Mad Max said, “I’m just here for the gasoline”.

“I Reckon You Got A Bargain, Don’t You?”

With the death of gasoline powered cars supposedly imminent, the idea of the “last V8 Interceptor” seems timelier than ever. The fact that the original Mad Max car was based on a practical family machine makes it even more appealing for the role Ford obviously has earmarked for this new product. One thing is for sure: I’m not doing a four-door gas-powered Mustang.

General Motors once proposed a four-seat Corvette, but somehow the decision was made to not take that step. In the same manner, from the first 1964 1/2 Mustang to the oversized Torino-style barges and even the reviled Pinto-based “II” model, Ford’s pony car has never strayed from its original mission as a two-door coupe. Notice that today the ‘Vette and Mustang nameplates are still on the Chevy and Ford websites as new cars, while other American legends that strayed from their original identities are now pushing daisies.

Something might be learned from that.

This Is What A Lotus 4-Door Sedan From 1987 Could Have Looked Like – The Autopian

There Should Have Been Two Fords With The Mustang Badge In 1974, And Here’s The First One – The Autopian

How Ford Could Attack The Electric Dodge Charger With A Mustang That’s Not A Mustang – The Autopian

A Daydreaming Designer Imagines The Mercury Version Of The Ford GT40 That Never Existed – The Autopian

What It Could Have Looked Like If Chevrolet Had Spun Off ‘Corvette’ As Its Own Brand And Sold A C4 Corvette SUV – The Autopian