The Mustang Twins Move Up

The most amazing success of an amazing auto year has been Ford's Mustang, an economical everyman's sports car that has run up 273,000 sales since its introduction nine months ago.

Detroit's hottest automaker, as a result, is Ford Division General Manager Lee Iacocca, 40 (TIME cover, April 17), who not only fathered the Mustang but ran his division so well that Ford in 1964 ate heavily into Chevrolet's predominant share of the middle-priced auto market.

Last week Iacocca got his reward. Piling his personal gear into a bright red Mustang, he sped the half-mile from his office to corporate headquarters in Dearborn, where he moved into the vacant office of group vice president, Iacocca, an executive noted for his hard salesmanship, will not only be in charge of all Ford cars and trucks --accounting for 80% of the company's sales--but of Ford of Canada and Lincoln-Mercury.

Into Iacocca's place as division vice president-general manager will move a man who also has been intimately involved in the conception and success of the Mustang: Assistant General Manager Donald Nelson Frey, 41, who engineered the Mustang from its beginning as the division's product planner. An assistant professor in metallurgy at the University of Michigan before he joined Ford in 1951, Frey is Detroit's most uncommon auto executive, a sort of thinking man's automaker. He speaks Russian and French, is an opera and archaeology buff, reads such publications as Red China's English-language Peking Review and the London Times's Literary Supplement along with his engineering journals. Though he has a doctorate in metallurgical engineering, his chief contributions to Ford have been as an idea man.

The promotion of Frey and Iacocca, both engineers, emphasizes the returning role of the engineer in Detroit, where the engineer predominated in earlier days but the stylists have taken most bows of late. As the Society of Automotive Engineers held its annual congress in Detroit last week, it could boast some top men as members: General Motors President John Gordon and G.M. Group Vice President Edward Cole are both engineers; so are four of Cole's five division vice presidents and Chrysler Vice President B. W. Bogan. The huge, complex auto companies are still marshaled by financial experts but, says Don Frey, "there are more engineers in management positions now than in the entire postwar period." And, like Frey and lacocca, they are getting closer to the top.

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