This is the Mustang that we know and love!
It exists for this V-8 engine!
This is being replaced by that! 🤮
[Earth-shattering kaboom]
[Non-Coronavirus Cough]
Well aware of the impending death of the internal combustion engine,
Ford has come up with a solution. And it's shaped... (sigh) like an SUV.
You're not going to want to hear this and (trust me) I don't want to have to say it. But I do.
The reality is: the internal combustion engine is being outlawed, and along with it dies the sports car as we know it.
Why?
Well, without the theater and the drama of a screaming engine, the idea of a sports car just doesn't sell.
You want proof?
Well, how many of these flaming hot things has Rimac sold? Like, one?
And yet, the entire world is touching themselves inappropriately over the
12,000-rpm, manual transmission T.50 — which doesn't even exist yet!
(Thank you!)
And that's because of experience!
Without experience, your "sports car" is just a "car."
And if it's just a car, then it needs to be practical — which is why Ford had no choice
but to make its first-ever, from-the-ground-up EV... an SUV.
Ford's Edge is roughly the same size and shape as the Mach-E
and yet it doesn't handle anything like this. And does not have this beautifully communicative steering.
Doesn't need to!
Look: when you remove the engine from the equation, the next most important thing for fun is handling.
It has really good chassis balance!
It's neutral — all the time!
And every time you go for the gas,
it sends all of the power to the back first, getting you sideways.
and then right afterwards, it engages the front motor, which pulls you straight.
And of course then, the stability control kills the whole thing.
Because you can't turn off the stability control, this Mach-E won't do lurid slides or illicit burnouts.
But it will let you have a good bit of fun.
i'm gonna go for the gas: ready, ready, ready, ready... and here we go!
Throws itself sideways! Yeah!
This is a real Mustang — in that sort-of way.
Look, sideways is the Mustang way.
And I'm sure if you were leaving a Cars & Coffee and saw a bunch of pedestrians...
Well, it would get 'em.
[Voice Assistant] Please try again.
Don't mind if I do! Hold on, lady! You asked for it!
[Jason Hallucinating] Pedestrians everywhere! Get 'em!
Obviously, I'm being ridiculous!
Even I know this is irrelevant, but i'm going to say it anyway.
The Mach-E's chassis balance is perfect — unlike any other SUV's, electric or not.
[Funktafied Music]
By putting the Mustang name on it, Ford knew we were going to hold the Mach-E to a higher handling standard.
And let's be honest for a second: this is the type of driving it needs to do well.
It's a crossover. It needs to provide general transportation.
And the Mach-E transportates well.
It has a cabin with seats in it!
It has four wheels!
A hatchback!
A frunk!
And it moves under its own power — quickly!
But isn't there more to life than this?
[Glorious Coyote V-8 noises echoing through the desert]
[Do you know how many lenses we broke doing this 150-mph stuff on a dusty runway?]
[Not enough. We'll try harder next time.]
Look, we all have transportation needs — but the whole point of a car like this is it meets most
of your transportation needs (no Home Depot runs) but it turns your commute into... an event.
I could be driving to work in a responsible quiet jelly bean...
...or I could drive this: a big, huge, green middle finger to everyone else!
Look, life is too short to be PC!
I'm gonna make it to work — but I'm gonna do burnouts the whole way there!
This is a vulgar...
...socially unacceptable...
...flash of color...
...in a gray, SUV world.
And Mustang has always been this way, no matter what was actually underneath the badge.
Remember that, until this S550 generation of Mustang — i.e for the first 50 years (!)
— the Mustang was effectively a tarted up economy car with a body sexy enough to brighten your day.
Mustang really just stands for something with a ton of sex appeal.
Dirty, trashy sex appeal!
So, Ford needed to graft the Mustang's sexy styling language onto an SUV.
...and that's not an easy thing to do.
The simple stuff means things like three-segment taillights with sequential blinkers...
...not having a Ford badge anywhere on the thing...
and the double brow-dashboard.
The Mach-E takes that traditional Mustang design cue and modernizes it
with great colors and textures including the cloth on the dash that looks like a big sound bar
(it's actually not)
But obviously, what dominates this whole interior is the big touchscreen
which is clear... and fraught with errors.
(This is a pre-production car - hopefully they fix all that stuff)
But it does have a [floating] rotary volume control which is the coolest thing in the world.
Overall though this interior is very well-designed, very well put-together, and comfortable.
This is a really nice place to spend some time.
The hard part is keeping the "utility" in a Sport Utility Vehicle
when it has to have that coupe roofline.
And that was a challenge accepted by Ford's Global Director of Battery Electric Vehicles...
Hey Siri, call Jason Castriota.
Jason was the chief designer on this car.
[Cammisa] JC? JC!
[Castriota] Hey Jason!
[Cammisa] Congratulations on the Mach-E! Looks great!
[Castriota] I think that the car on the road holds its own.
[Cammisa] I gotta ask you a question. Like, I want to be a fly on the wall in whatever board room someone was like,
"Hey, I need you to design an SUV but, like, I want to put like a Mustang badge on it."
Did you, like, go apoplectic? Did someone die?!
[Castriota] Actually, I was part of the small, heretic team that said, "we need to make a Mustang SUV that's also battery-electric."
[Cammisa] Always making your life easy on yourself, aren't you?
[Castriota] Step one is: it's got to look the part, right?
So, you know, from a design and architecture standpoint, if we didn't have the proportions, we would have never gotten there.
Firrst and foremost is about capturing that silhouette. And to capture that silhouette, that means you needed that long hood,
that swept back windscreen, and that very fast roofline.
So with that we extended the wheelbase of the vehicle to shorten the overhangs, get that dash-to-axle...
[Cammisa] Dash-to-axle yeah...
[Castriota] We swept the windscreen rearward and the most important part of the design is really how we hide the height of the vehicle...
...with the body colored rail that mimics the Mustang coupe, accelerating really fast over the passengers...
...and then using the upper rail and the roof section in gloss black and glass to actually hide the true height of the vehicle...
[Cammisa] I love how all of you designers think, if you put something in black no one's ever going to notice, right?
I mean that's why I'm wearing a black shirt. As if no one's going to notice that I gained, like, 75 pounds during COVID.
[Castriota] We are absolutely pulling the wool over your eyes!
It's all about the visual tricks that we have in our designer toolkit...
...to make this vehicle look more compact than it is, more muscular than it is, sleeker than it is.
[Cammisa] Alright, I've got another question. I mean, what's with the doors?!
The door opening is like six inches further down than the door itself. What are you trying to hide?
[Castriota] I know Adam Sandler's made a lot of money, and he's probably pretty bored. But how did you get him to be your stunt double in that J-Turn video?
[Cammisa] With all of Jason's design tricks covered up 'neatly' with tape, this is what the Mach-E actually looks like.
Way more meaty and quite good-looking in an Alfa Romeo Stelvio-kind of way...
...but far less like a Mustang coupe.
But the important thing is that Ford is zigging while all of the other car makers are zagging.
They're all protecting their traditional products at all cost — inventing entirely new lineups...
...like VW with the ID.3 to protect the Golf...
or entirely new brands — like Polestar, to protect all of Volvo.
But Ford's got it right! Innovation doesn't happen unless you're willing to sacrifice your current products.
Hmm. Maybe Ford has learned something from Silicon Valley.
Steve Jobs once famously said, "if you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will cannibalize you."
And I think what he actually meant is that if I don't race that Tesla, someone else will.
Oh no!
Well...
So, the Tesla is, like, a second quicker through the quarter-mile. But these are both really quick cars.
Genuinely quick cars.
Out! Let's go!
Thank you.
This dopey-looking SUV would leave a Lamborghini Diablo for dead... and it's the slow Tesla!
It doesn't have any of that Italian V-12 drama, so Tesla had to resort
to things like turning the turn signals into farts.
[Wet fart sound.]
The future is looking very juvenile, kids!
But the future is also looking very stark and minimalist.
And while I would love to make fun of this featureless dashboard,
the touchscreen works so well I have nothing to say.
I mean, there is no other car company that even comes close to this level of functionality.
I will say that in the handling department,
this does not do what the Mach-E does.
At the limit, it just wants you to stop.
But I don't think that really matters.
Look, the Model Y is not going to be held to some elevated standard because its name was used on a sports car for the last 55 years. No.
If anything, the name Tesla just stands for efficiency...
...and nobody does efficiency like Tesla.
To wit: this is about the same size on the outside as the Mach-E is, and yet it's way bigger on the inside.
[Blatant Lie] 4.7 times larger in fact!
And it weighs 500 [actual] pounds less.
And it has 25% less aerodynamic drag.
All of which means that the Mach-E needs a bigger battery to go slower and less far.
[Turn Signal Farts]
[Director, sitting in the passenger seat, also bursts out in nervous laughter. He had beans for lunch.]
Both of these cars have enough range to work as your daily driver,
but on a road trip into the middle of nowhere, the Tesla works and the Ford... doesn't.
And that's half the fault of the car and half the fault of the charging network.
Tesla owns everything from start to finish.
So you show up at a Tesla supercharger station with your Tesla, and you plug it in, and it just works. Every time.
In the Ford, like every other EV, you're fully dependent on an independent network of charging companies, and they all suck.
EVGo, Chargepoint, and don't get me started on Electrify America, which literally has never worked no matter what i've plugged into it.
And then there's the car itself.
The Mach-E won't allow its battery to fast-charge past 80 percent, decimating road-trip range.
So even if Ford had a supercharging network like Tesla's, the Model Y would still be the better road trip vehicle.
It may be ugly but, I've gotta say, the Tesla is the far better transportation device in almost every logical way.
But no one ever buys a car because of logic.
Nope! People buy cars for emotion, and nothing says emotion like a drag race!
Here it comes!
This is going to be one of those overly dramatic drag race sequences!
Okay! Aspect-ratio change, we are done.
Vignette effect... yep, there it is!
Unnecessary revs!
[Mustang GT revs engine to Jason's delight.]
Unnecessary burnout...
...opponent side eye...
I have my own version of that!
Sunglasses flip...
I think we're done. All right...count down!
[Ridiculously Over-The-Top Voice] Three!
[Ridiculously Over-The-Top Voice] Two!
[Ridiculously Over-The-Top Voice] One!
Go?
The gas-powered Mustang is a second quicker to 60 mph and quicker still by the end of a quarter-mile...
but even the Mach-E is going over 100 mph by then! It's not slow.
...and this is all presuming the GT gets a perfect textbook launch.
I'm not sure this is all that relevant back on Planet Earth.
This is how it happens in the real world.
That thing's not even going to be in gear yet by the time...
And this is the way of the future — Silent Speed.
As for the Mach-E, this is just the beginning.
Ford has already announced the GT and GT Performance Editions.
Steve Jobs once famously quoted, of all people, Henry Ford, who said that...
if he'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
What they really wanted was a car — they just didn't know it yet.
And what people really want now, for general transportation, is an electric car — they just don't know it yet.
But once you've lived with an EV, you just can't go back.
Will this electric SUV replace the Mustang we know and love and puts a smile on our face?
No!
But it pains me to say this:
The Mustang's days are numbered because its underhood horses have a date with the glue factory.
We are heading towards an all-electric future because we have to.
And while that's really gonna suck in some ways,
Ford's, at least, letting us have a little fun.
It's not a screaming, green sports car...
but it's also not a gray blob of an SUV, either.
Oh! And something else!
By putting that Mustang badge on the Mach-E, Ford got you to watch a whole video on a midsize SUV you would have otherwise never even cared about.
....sucker! 😜
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