Ford shows the front-wheel drive, horrors that could have been the 1994 Mustang

Ford is gearing up to celebrate the Mustang’s 50th anniversary and so the company is taking a look back at its origins.

The latest that we come across of this history takes us to through the design process of the 1994 Mustang. In the early days of development of this model, designers had been given a free hand to envision the model as they saw fit. As a result, there were quite a few oddities that included a shooting brake that would have been positioned to battle the Volkswagen Golf GTI. Others, as Ford notes, look “more like a Matchbox dream than production reality.”

Ford was still playing around with the idea of a front-wheel drive Mustang in spite of facing a sea of criticism in the 1980s. Early design proposals attempted to cover the switch with rear-drive styling elements but Ford the company says that they were simply a desperate attempt. Finally only one front-wheel drive clay model was built before the decision was made to stick with rear-wheel drive.

As development progressed, a number of cars were built and designers finally managed to combine the best elements from them to make the production model.