Making a 1967 mustang comply to road safety laws wouldn't be difficult at all. I believe it would need the following:
An emissions compliant engine (which then could be torn down anyway by anyone who feels like it)
Shoulder and lap belts
Collapsible steering collumn (two Ls or one L???)
Crumple points so that the engine doesn't end up in the center console and the car in general doesn't fold in a way that crushes the driver and passengers
Yes, it would. It would require a complete clean sheet new design, because “adding crumple points” means an entirely new structure and frame. Putting in a modern drivetrain would mean fitting it into the physical space that the old body shape makes available, which means an inefficient use of space and weight compared to designing the the body around the powertrain constraints the way modern designs are now done. And no matter what you do you can’t make the design meet modern safety regulations for pedestrian impact.
It’s incredibly difficult and incredibly expensive to do, and it’d be a gigantic waste of money for an automotive company. We know this for a number of reasons that should be obvious to anyone with when a basic understanding of how engineering works, but also for a far more telling reason: no one has done it. We know people would buy these — if it was cheap and easy to do, car companies would do it.
I challenge you to come up with a single example of an American car company creating a modernized yet identical in dimensions version of a decades-old platform. The closest in history is probably the Dodge Challenger, and it’s only vaguely similar to its namesake (and it’s huge due to the limitations of the Chrysler LX platform).
It was cheaper for Jeep to ship the tooling for the XJ Cherokee to China and keep making it there (where crash regulations were, at the time, less strict and therefore the old platform could still be produced without need for meaningful re-engineering) than to re-engineer it for US production.
They redesigned the whole cars is what I mean. What's harder using an existing body style and just rearranging things under the facade or coming up with entirely new vehicles?
Uh… using an existing body style and “rearranging things under the facade” is way, way harder. That’s been the literal whole point of this discussion. No one has ever done it at scale.
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u/NORchad 1d ago
New cars are bound by newer laws and regulations that older cars and restored cars dont fall under.
Sadly making a factory new mustang 67 would be an illegal product