Originally posted by http://www.svoca.com:
Epilog
There was talk at Ford about '86 being the last year of the Mustang. The reasoning was, the increasing popularity of the Mazda built Probe and better EPA numbers would help Ford meet their CAFE requirements. The SVO team was informed that the Mustang would be dropped at the end of '86.
With the SVO team notified of the demise of the Mustang, work was begun on a new SVO T Bird. While the work progressed, the UAW approached Ford and pointed out, If the Mustang was replaced by the off shore produced Probe, many Dearborn workers would be without jobs. Ford agreed and signed a contract with the UAW to produce the Mustang until 1993.
They started working on a t-bird, but it was never produced...the upgrades that were going to be on it, were later sold in the Ford Motorsport catalog.
Before this point SVO focused strictly on the Mustang, so Ford was developing the turbocoupe alongside of SVO designing the SVO Mustang. Not to mention the first turbocoupes were released in 1983 while SVO was still hard at work on the SVO Mustangs.
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