Okay, I'll throw my two cents' in:
Mustangs are common, and not an entirely bad choice:
- There's an enormous amount of stuff out there for them.
- The design sucks (bad chassis, poor weight distribution) but it can be made to work well (and even better-than-well), depending on how much money you're prepared to throw at it.
The downsides are equally apparent:
- Every cop knows that every big-tired Mustang has a Vortech on it and a teenager behind the wheel who probably doesn't know how to control his impulses; when my '89 (admittedly with cage, 351W, 2.5" Cervini hood, and two-chamber Flowmasters it wasn't subtle) was street legal my bespectacled fortyish *** would get followed for ten miles.
- Every car thief knows that Mustangs are easy to pinch and the parts will be profitable.
- They're built like tinfoil, and one of the first critical mods is to do something about their floppy structure by cutting holes in the floor and welding in some good structural reinforcements (e.g. the Griggs floorpan kit).
For those reasons I consider it less than an optimal choice for a street car. The visibility issues can be addressed by using a Fairmont or other Fox-chassis sedan instead of a Mustang, but they're all built like crap and have cheesy interiors and lousy seats. I like the Volvo swap for a number of reasons:
- The Volvo is a better structure and has a better chassis design than any factory-stock '79-present Mustang save the late-model IRS Cobras (the straightliners bitch about wheel hop with the IRS, but screw 'em, if they want a drag warhead they should have bought something else.) Volvo's rear suspension designs are what the Fox cars should have had: three-link and torque-arm setups.
- The Volvo shape is as cop-repellent a shape as one can find. For added invisibility get a tan wagon and make sure it's badged as a DL - no Turbo badges.
- The Volvo has a much nicer interior, better seats, and enough room for almost any activity.
The downsides of the Volvo swap, as I see them:
- It's a swap, so even with a Converse kit or other guide to work from, there's going to be stuff that has to be sorted out, stuff that is best done by someone with significant mechanical expertise and enough experience to have seen the right and wrong ways to do things. There are engine swap cars littering garages all over the country that never go anywhere because the owner lost interest or lost budget before getting everything sorted out.
- Your friends with Mustangs will heckle you over your hearse. Remember, though, these are going to be the same guys who see Christmastime in their rear-view mirrors six times a year 'cause the cops follow their Mustangs around.
- Engine swaps in smog-year vehicles have some extra hoops to jump through legally. In California it's not much worse than trying to smog a Mustang with a wad of aftermarket parts on it, but you better be swapping in a smog-legal engine or one that looks and acts like it's smog-legal (a nice Ford 331 stroker with GT40 heads and all CARB EO'd external parts.)
Now, what I've wanted to do for a while is a '75-76 Nova with an aluminum-head 502 crate motor in it; the '75-79 Nova chassis was about the best old-style stick-axle-and-leafspring chassis GM ever did (basically the '70 Camaro design), you can get weight distribution near 50/50 with aluminum heads and some careful attention to what parts you use up front, big-car brakes and other parts are cheap, and the shape interests no one.