What the 1998 New Beetle did to start the Retro Craze, the Ford Mustang has been doing to keep it alive. It’s already very difficult to update a retro design (as VW themselves found out), but that they have done it successfully for three generations and however many facelifts. The new version continues the trend. You can draw a straight line between its design language and the 2005 car. That being said, it’s not without faults.
Let’s start at the interior. I’m not particularly angry about the classic dash styling gone because, honestly, it always struck me as something they did to save on tooling. What I will complain about is the lack of redundant physical controls for HVAC on the center stack. I know that we have been going towards a paradigm where interacting with your car more closely resembles interacting with your smartphone. But that the same people who prevent you from using your smartphone allow a center console that is just like that, only with a non-standard UI and more room to guess where everything is to guarantee that extra MPH before the driver hits the Mansfield bars.
The rest of the car is fine. Of course it is. It’s an evolution of the S550 that was already the Ne plus Ultra of the muscle car and the reason why smaller sports cars and hot hatches are not as prevalent on this continent where price is king (“Why have a Golf R when you can have a mustang?” indeed.) Ford, aware of the increasing restrictions on the sell of gasoline-powered vehicles, has stuck to their guns and left the Mustang gasoline-only for the foreseeable future. If you want an EV Mustang, buy the Mach-E. Then reconsider your attachment to brand names.
For all the memes circling around mocking the fact that the new front end is basically just an Audi, I have to admit that for me the best executed version of the design is the humble Ecoboost-powered version. It shows that the design itself is sound even when devoid of all of the flares and scoops that you get on the GT version or the “Mach 1 by any other name” Dark Horse model. All of that being said, since we’ll be singing the death of the ICE car for a while longer yet, the one to have will naturally be the V8/manual one. Buy it now, enjoy it until you have to buy synthetic fuel in gallon jugs at $25 a pop.
The surprising thing here is that Ford has won at the muscle car again. GM has decided that the Camaro will be bidding farewell in 2023, to be replaced with…something altogether more sensible, practical, and undoubtedly more forgettable. Meanwhile, Stellantis is making sure that if the planet has decided that their goodbye to ICE it is to go away in a blaze of glory worthy of the ludicrous V8s upon which the late Sergio Marchionne rekindled the brand after its latest brush of death. That leaves the mustang as it was when the S-197 launched 17 years ago. A class of one, doing its own thing confident in the fact that, whatever happens next, it won.
