Ford Mustang Fastback Eleanor

The 1967 Mustang Fastback is the basis for the most recognisable American film car of the last thirty years. Ford restyled the Mustang for 1967 with a wider body and a larger engine bay, and that is exactly what made the fastback work as the starting point for Eleanor: the 2000 remake of Gone in 60 Seconds needed a car that looked heavy and hostile, and the 1967 shell had the proportions for it.

The Eleanor look is a build recipe rather than a factory model. It takes the 1967 fastback and adds a fibreglass nose with driving lamps set into the grille, a bonnet scoop, side-exit exhausts, wider arches, five-spoke wheels and the grey paint with twin stripes the film made famous. The cars used on screen were built for the production in more than one specification, some finished for close-up work and others treated as expendable stunt cars. Because Eleanor is fundamentally a styling package, the mechanical specification of any given car depends entirely on who built it, which is why provenance matters more here than model year.

Eleanor Originals, Tribute Cars and the Copyright Fight

Two things separate an original from a tribute: paperwork and the law. A small number of cars were built for the film and those have traceable histories with auction results to match, while everything else is a tribute assembled to the same recipe, which is what this car is and what the page header states. Whether Eleanor counts as a protected character has also been argued in American courts for years, and that argument has shaped what builders are able to advertise and sell. We set out the originals, the prices and the builders in Ford Mustang Eleanor: originals, auctions, builders.

In the Batman Garage collection Eleanor sits with the cars that earned their reputation on film rather than on a spec sheet. The Movie Cars section covers the rest, including the 1969 Mustang from John Wick and the Pontiac Trans Am of Smokey and the Bandit. The gallery below was shot in the garage, with the specification table underneath.