[QUOTE='69Mach1Chick]The abyss is a bad place. I never realized how poorly built mustangs were until i had to take one apart. The cowls were designed really poorly and as for the seat thing...we double prime inside and out before we even weld the floor pans, etc. together. I just never understood why there would be an open seam there. It is so easy for moisture to get in. And if anything does fall in there it will rust like crazy.[/QUOTE]
It's actually quite simple really. Ford built these as the ecno affordable by everyone cars back in the day, and no one ever expected the cars to be on the road past a 10 year mark, so building them bullet proof made no sense and would have pushed them over into a higher range sell price. You would be surpirsed at how much cost you have to take out of something just to take a little bit out of the retail price unless you want to totally give up all your profit margin.
An example from my field, I design childrens shoes. If the shoe sells for around $20 that means wholesale is around $10 and the factory charges me $5 to make it. So now someone wants to do a promotional version of it and sell it for $16, that makes cost $8 and I have to build it for $4.00. Certain costs are fixed, like labor and overhead ($1.50) meaning that $1 has to come out of my raw materials, now, that gives me a lousy $2.50 to build a pair of shoes from, not much, and there aren't a lot of places to cheapen it either. Now picture that in thousands of dollars and try to find places without sacraficing safety to make the product cost efficient. In the scope of things Ford didn't do such a bad job after all.