This lame horse EV needs to be put down, frankly

Yes, Ford did have to design and build an all-new electric vehicle from the ground up, because the market demands it. But putting a Mustang badge on it is like slapping the Apple logo on two tin cans connected with a length of string.

Stephen Corby

The Ford Mustang Mach-E GT.

3 min read

11:06AMNovember 21, 2024.

Updated 3:00PMNovember 21, 2024

People who know me well insist that I am a hater, but I prefer to say I just intensely dislike things. And people. A lot of people.

Even if you are someone who claims not to hate (my business partner takes a bullishly Buddhist position on this, and I try not to hate him for it, but I think he’s lying), you’ll surely relate to the idea that some people grate on you over time.

I often find that I can meet someone a few times and only find them inoffensively boring, but if I am repeatedly exposed to their flatulent, phatic conversations then the roils of resentment can quickly reach boiling point.

I recently had this experience at a more heightened rate over a week spent with a car that simply should not exist, the Ford Mustang Mach-E GT. Yes, Ford did have to design and build an all-new electric vehicle from the ground up, because the market demands it, but putting a Mustang badge on it is like slapping the Apple logo on two tin cans connected with a length of string.

The Mustang badge is pure Americana; it represents things like freedom (specifically the freedom to be inappropriately loud in public places), muscular exceptionalism and thirsty, offensive, emission-spewing V8 engines. It also means looking cool, desirable and instantly recognisable. And yet the Mach-E looks like it doesn’t know if it’s pregnant or just bloated. It might be a squashed SUV or a pumpty-dumpty sedan/hatch, but what it’s definitively not is a Mustang. And Ford did not have to call it one, or allow it to wear the famous pony badge on its perversely plastic nose. Frankly, someone should have stopped them.

The Mustang badge is pure Americana – but the Mach-E looks like it doesn’t know if it’s pregnant or just bloated.

I tried not to hate the Mach-E before driving it, and even attempted to gather some gusto about the fact that I was being given the allegedly sporty GT variant (the entry-level version gets one electric motor making 198kW, but the GT gets two, for a total of 358kW and 860Nm). But despite being pitched as a competitor for scarily exciting cars like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, I spent the first few days, and a few hundred kilometres, being merely bored by the Mustang’s lack of personality. And that was before I’d even attempted to drive it in its dullest mode, Whisper, which sounds like a brand of toilet paper.

This will no doubt thrill the EV haters out there, but the Mach-E reminded me that a dull car with an internal-combustion engine – a Toyota Camry, for example – is one thing, but a boring electric vehicle can be so lacking in personality that it’s like conversing with a frog.

Apparently in “Untame” mode the Mach-E GT can hit 100km/h in 3.7 seconds, but I was reluctant to engage that option often because I thought it sounded stupid and because I generally found the whole car insipid.

Inside the Ford Mustang Mach-E GT.

Sure, like most EVs it’s very fast in a straight line (and if you push it hard it makes fake noises in the cabin, which aren’t completely awful) but the driving position is too high, the seats aren’t capable of holding you up if you corner hard and you won’t want to do that anyway because nothing about the steering or handling encourages such behaviour.

Then there’s the gear-select toggle dial thing, which feels not just cheap but beyond nasty, and has no place in a car Ford is attempting to sell for $97,990 (the even less exciting base model starts at $72,990).

As the week wore on, however, I really began to hate this car, mainly because of the ride quality, which made my long-suffering wife feel sick and me mystified. Ford claims this Mustang has MagneRide Adaptive Suspension, which can be tuned to deliver either a cosseting ride or an exhilarating one, but while I was driving it I got a message on the screen saying the system had a fault and thus I could no longer select any modes at all.

After that the car seemed to have effectively no suspension, and driving it felt like being strapped to a seat and then thrown down a flight of stairs.

Ford is attempting to selln this car for $97,990.

Unfortunately I already felt uncomfortable enough, because I could feel people staring at me and wondering what sort of idiot I was for buying such a mild Mustang. The worst moments were when I pulled up next to people driving proper, petrol-powered Mustangs, at which point I would attempt to slump so far down in the seat that my chin was on the brake pedal.

I guess if Ford had made an electric Mustang that was as wildly exciting and uninhibitedly silly as Tesla’s Model 3 Performance, using the famous badge would not have been a crime. But then if fate had made me a person less filled with hate and vitriol I’d be writing about gardening and ranting less often about why jazz music should be outlawed, and the world would be a poorer place for that.