A week spent in a six-cylinder Ford Mustang convertible — and, under the Florida sun, an especially pleasant week — prompts me to ponder the canvas-covered mechanical miracle that has the ability to transform a ho-hum car into something much greater than the sum of its parts. Hacking off a coupe's roof and filling the hole with a hodgepodge of steel bars and hinges draped in canvas cloth rarely does much good for a car, dynamically speaking. This Mustang shakes and shimmies over even mildly uneven pavement, it's heavier by about 125 pounds, and with 210 horsepower to get things moving, not exactly pony-car-swift. And yet, in purely emotional terms, it's a complete charmer. Amazing what a little fresh air can do. Now I'm not suggesting by any stretch of the imagination that only base-model Mustangs have gone from lame to lovable through the loss of a steel top. Loads of cars have. (It's often an eleventh-hour ploy by manufacturers to stir up a little interest in models that as enclosed cars have proven, um, a bit disappointing.) To wit:
- The 1986 Maserati Biturbo Spyder
- the 1990 Buick Reatta;
- the 1990 Yugo Cabrio;
- the 1991 Infiniti M30;
- and the 1997 Toyota Paseo. It's hard to believe there was a time, not all that long ago, when the convertible faced the very real possibility of extinction. During the late 1970s and early '80s, before the arrival of Chrysler's popular K-car convertible (and, for 1983, the first droptop Mustang in a decade), rumors abounded that the open-topped automobile, considered a menace to society, might be legislated into oblivion in America. I, for one, am glad that never came to pass. The automotive world a richer place for open-topped motoring.
In all fairness, our $31,000 test car, which featured a pretty slick manual transmission, the "Pony" appearance package, heated leather seats, the booming Shaker 500 audio system, and newly available xenon headlamps, has been a class act, even with the top up.
