Inner Beauty

I have been fascinated with car interiors as long as I can remember. Why not concern yourself with the inner beauty that surrounds you every time you drive a car? There has always been a fascination for the shapes and colors of exterior steel, aluminum, and fiberglass, but whenever you are behind the wheel, the only thing in your line of sight is the hood line.

There have been many exquisite interior designs over the years, but a certain clever few from The Sixties stand out. The '64-'66 T-bird's rounded rear seat with its barroom-corner styling was distinctive. Although the 1965 Sting Ray had sumptuously broad panels in its seating surfaces, the '66 model returned to more traditional pleats because the wide panels tore their seams too easily. Entering through a door that curved into the roofline furthered the elegance of what may have been the most visually perfect interior in an American car. The 1967 Austin-Healey 3000 featured an unforgettable Olde English look of wood and leather in a tiny four-seater format. Of course the inside of an XK-E presented the same flavor in a larger, more upscale style with a lot more paniche.

Pictured above is probably the most special of all these classic Sixties car interiors. The Interior Decor Group was an option on late-1965 and all 1966 Mustangs. The incredibly low price of about a $100 bought you a lot of classy trim, and over 100,000 Mustangs of these two years were built with this option package. Popularly called the Pony Interior due to the embossed running ponies on the front surfaces of the seatbacks, the IDG was offered in a large selection of single and two-tone colors. The light blue and white combination shown here has always been my personal favorite. $107 bought you the guage cluster from the GT, a fake-wood steering wheel with matching trim on the dash, a more elegant upholstery pattern, chrome pedal trim, and fancier door panels with integral armrests if your Mustang was built after February 1965. The '66 version of all Mustangs got the GT's instrument panel, so the Pony Interior cost only $94 throughout that whole production year. The Decor Group did not include the console in the option price, but if you ordered the console, too, it featured additional plastic wood trim to match the dash and steering wheel. You will notice from the photo that this car not only has the console, but air conditioning and a manual transmission. As you might imagine, the topless/AC and manual/console combos are quite rare, making this a very delectable Mustang Convertible!

The Mustang Pony Interior was special because it brought such a high level of pseudo-elegance to the masses. With the exception of the Thunderbird, the 109,693 built dwarfed the production numbers of the other notable interiors mentioned. Have you seen the option price of leather seating surfaces on the front-buckets-only for a modern Mustang? The phrase choke a horse might come to mind. Pony interiors were offered in twelve color combinations in '65 and thirteen in '66. Bland is the buzzword for modern Mustang interior grays and tans. A few models feature slap-you-awake red, but the natural elegance of blue and white with wood accents is long gone.