It’s difficult to imagine this radical design ever becoming the 1965 Mustang, but it’s an interesting machine in its own right. 

The development program at Ford Motor Company that led to the 1965 Mustang was a pretty big deal for the Dearborn carmaker. Just to show how serious it was, Ford design VP Gene Bordinat placed all three of his design studios in a head-to-head competition to create an exterior design for new vehicle, which was known as the Special Falcon project early on. (The Mustang was in part inspired by the surprising success of the Corvair Monza against the Falcon in key market segments—see our feature on the Monza here.) 

With all hands on deck, the Ford studio, the Lincoln-Mercury Studio, and the Advanced Design studio each submitted multiple designs in the contest. And as we know now, it was a Ford Studio proposal originally drafted by Gale Halderman that won the day and eventually became the production Mustang. But the also-rans included a number of intriguing designs as well—including this one from the Advanced Design Studio that was called the Stiletto.

Introduced to the Ford brass as a full-size clay model on August 16, 1962 along with the rest of the Special Falcon proposals, the Stiletto shares almost nothing with any production Mustang. In fact, it’s a stretch to visualize the Stiletto as a production vehicle at all. The front and rear bumpers are wildly impractical, for one thing, offering little or no protection. And the Stiletto name itself isn’t exactly warm and fuzzy, either.

Like all the proposals in the Special Falcon project, the Stiletto was designed to share the compact Falcon platform and use the full complement of inline-six and small V8 powertrains (a production strategy devised by Ford engineer Hal Sperlich). But with its radical front end treatment, prominent bright metal, and severe, dramatic lines, it’s easier to imagine the Stiletto not as a Mustang, but as a future Thunderbird. We can picture that.