The Ford Mustang might be one of the most famous cars to borrow its name from an animal, but the exact origins of that name are lost to time. Accounts differ on whether the car was named directly after the animal or after the P-51 Mustang fighter plane, and even Ford doesn’t have a definitive answer. In a 2013 press release, the brand noted that many names had been bandied around for Ford’s new sports car at the time. According to the release, designer John Najjar claimed that he had thought of the Mustang name, first seeing it used on the airplane but then realizing that its animal connotations fitted well with the type of car that the team were trying to create.
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Ford intended for it to be a workhorse, with the brand’s head of engineering explaining in 1962 that the car needed to be
