A pony car is a class of automobile. The term is applied to North American-built "baby muscle cars"—performance cars built on compact (by American standards) passenger car chassis. The first cars of this type appeared as 1965 models in mid 1964 as the Ford Mustang (after which the type is named) and Plymouth Barracuda. Subsequent pony cars included the Chevrolet Camaro, Pontiac Firebird, Mercury Cougar, AMC Javelin and Dodge Challenger. The second of the three Mercury Capri models also qualifies.
Of these, only the Ford Mustang is still in production, although the Camaro and Firebird were built until 2002.
Pony cars were designed to be more affordable than their larger muscle car brethren, and were substantially smaller and lighter. Earlier versions often could not accommodate the manufacturer's largest, most powerful engines for that reason, although all were later modified to correct this.
Some high-performance models were rated as fairly capable performers in their day, and had some racing success. They were always sporting conversions of regular passenger cars, though, in terms of chassis design, rather than dedicated sports cars, and like muscle cars were generally better in a straight line than when agile handling was required, although this could be addressed to some degree with aftermarket upgrades.
Old pony cars are nowadays highly collectable, especially the high-performance models.
