The special Monday car - Or: to err is to mint
06/04/2024
In collectors' circles, coins that have been minted incorrectly sometimes fetch absurdly high prices far above their face value. However, this criterion has not yet been applied to cars, although nowadays people are almost desperately looking for any supposed special feature in order to increase their value. What can be "misprinted" on a car? The most important thing: its identity.
At Ford, the chassis number was still stamped into the sheet metal with individual stamps until the 1967 model year. Specifically: in the upper edge of the left-hand side wall of the engine compartment. As things usually had to be done quickly on the assembly line and the shift workers were only human, the combination of letters and numbers did not always find their way into the sheet metal without errors on the first attempt.
Sometimes two digits of the consecutive serial number were mixed up or a "3" instead of an "8" was picked up in the setting box. So a second number was quickly hammered into the plate, a "V" for "void" was placed before and after the wrong number and the error was rectified. Four attempts like the one on this 1967 Ford Mustang are therefore most likely a record.
Not only was it mistakenly given the most powerful V8 instead of the weakest ("S" instead of "C" in fifth place), but the serial number did not match on the first attempt. Nor on the second. On the third attempt, everything was correct, but apparently the Ford factory in San Jose was dissatisfied with the legibility, which is why he stamped the VIN a fourth time. Was the weekend still in his bones? In any case, January 30, 1967, when the turquoise coupé was built, was a Monday.
But although the Ford comes from half a century of family ownership, the color combination is relatively rare and some users on bringatrailer.com joked that they would love to buy the Mustang for the chassis number chaos alone, the big escalation failed to materialize. The hammer finally fell at a perfectly normal 20,500 US dollars for a perfectly normal Mustang - albeit one with a little something special.
