Price as tested: £35,745
Engine: 4,951cc, V8
Power: 410bhp
Transmission: 6-speed
0-62mph: 4.8 seconds
Top speed: 155mph
MPG: 23.5
CO2: 281g/km
For decades, Mustang fans have only been able to drive this iconic beast while on holiday Stateside. And what a car it is over there. With your stetson tossed in the back, smoked rib juice staining your checked shirt and Johnny Cash cranked up, the car’s played a starring role in many of our cowboy fantasies. Now, at last, Ford has swapped the steering wheel to the right and unleashed its wild horse in the UK. Which is how I found myself in a muscle car with a throbbing 5-litre V8 crawling through rush hour traffic. But riding a rodeo pony on to centre court at Wimbledon would make more sense. The clutch is so heavy it feels like I’m doing gym curls with my left calf, the gigantic engine jumps and snorts, and even the satnav seems confused. Then it starts to rain heavily. It feels like the car – and me – are a long way from home.
But hold on one cotton-picking minute, this car is supposed to be a goddarn legend. There isn’t a fuel-sniffer on the planet who wouldn’t want to slip behind its wheel with that famous chromed logo galloping across it. There you can sit back and look over the double-brow dash, across the twin-ridged bonnet and out on to the grasslands of, um, Guildford.
Hit the starter and the giant engine burbles. But it’s quieter than you think, disappointingly so, despite offering a colossal 410bhp. In the UK you can wimp out and buy the car with a far a more sensible 2.3-litre EcoBoost. But, if you are the kind of person who wants a muscle car, you aren’t going to feel happy with anything less than the red-blooded V8. You wouldn’t want your stetson to go limp.
With its shark-bite nose, heavily muscled shoulders and sculpted haunches, the new Mustang is certainly handsome, in a square-cut way. Little tweaks, such as the front wheel curtains and the tapered funnels at the back, all boost its aerodynamic appeal. Red is the colour most will go for, but the test vehicle I drove was banana yellow. This brought even more attention. People went crazy for it. Alongside the usual waves and thumbs-ups of passersby I even had one young fan stand to attention and salute me – at least I think that’s what he was doing. Another delight is the puddle light – a small LED on the underside of each wing-mirror which beams the silhouette of a wild horse on to the pavement. Also, the speedo has written across the top ‘Ground Speed’ as if this is actually a rocket that at any moment will head skywards.
However all of this didn’t add up to a true bromance for me. There are bigger engines out there, but none that feel so over-commissioned for the work expected of them. I haven’t kangarooed a car so often since I was a learner. The car feels impossibly heavy at times, and even with the steering in comfort mode, a three-point turn was to be avoided. I can’t remember the last time I chose to walk to the shops rather than drive. On longer runs it came into its own, but do you want a car that’s a struggle the moment there’s any congestion?
The interior appears shockingly cheap. The plastics used are so brittle you feel they might have been made of takeaway containers. I couldn’t get comfortable in the driving seat, despite a week of faffing with the settings. The back seats are a joke. The boot is unexpectedly large, but the liner is so flimsy you’d be worried even carry-on baggage would crack it. The satnav is Paleo it’s so outdated and tricky to use. It was all quite disheartening.
But perhaps the biggest surprise of all is the price: the Mustang starts at £31,745. I asked dozens of neighbours how much they thought the car cost and the lowest offer I got was 40 grand. If only they’d spent more time getting to know the car, they might have lowered their estimate.
Hey ho, they always say you should never meet your heroes…
Better by design
I was recently contacted by Richard Herriott, assistant professor of Industrial Design at the Design School at Kolding in Denmark, who was puzzled by my lack of ‘design literacy’ when discussing new cars. I mentioned to him I was driving the new Mustang and he kindly agreed to cast his expert eye over it. This is what he had to say:
The overall change is that Ford have accentuated the horizontal character of the vehicle. While the old car looked more brutal and Aston Martin-esque, the new one has smoother blends, and the two features that interrupted the front-to-rear flow are gone: the heavy B-pillar and the J-shaped scallop. At the front the lamps are slimmer and wrap around to the sides, again stressing horizontality and width. I think the previous car looked more masculine and robust. The new one loses some of that in the name of flow. In a sense there is not much you can do with a re-design if you have to maintain generation to generation visual continuity. The main elements are retained, but all adjusted within limits. The same kind of thing has happened with the Audi TT and the Golf. The Mustang isn’t only about a package and a certain type of performance. The customers also want the look. And the catch with this is that signalling change can be difficult. Too much and the customers go away, and if the look is the same the critics criticise the conservatism.
Well, I couldn’t have said it better… Thanks Prof!
Email Martin at martin.love@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @MartinLove166
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