As tradition has it, Ford vice president Lewis Crusoe and chief stylist George Walker were walking down a street in Paris in 1951 when Crusoe pointed to a sports car at the curb. "Why can't we have something like that?" Crusoe asked Walker. Walker got on the phone to Dearborn and set designer Frank Hershey to work on a two-seat car built around Ford mechanicals. A clay model was completed by May 1953, and Crusoe gave the go-ahead for production in September.

Ostensibly a response to Chevrolet's 1953 Corvette, the new car, christened "Thunderbird," had gestated in parallel with Chevy's plastic sports car. Executed in steel rather than fiberglass, the Thunderbird was intended from the beginning as a "personal car" (later upscaled to "personal luxury car"), not a real sports car. Production began in September 1954, with public introduction a month later.

Riding a 102-inch wheelbase, the Thunderbird was given the largest of Ford's 1955 engines, the 292 cubic inch