What's this?
Something with
Mustang in its nameplate, and as a result you won't fail to have noticed that this new Ford Mustang Mach-E has the following aesthetic attributes: there is not a Blue Oval badge to be seen on the exterior, with any logos or emblems being those of a galloping horse persuasion; it has headlights that look a bit like those on a Mustang, as well as the American icon's distinctive triple-bar rear lamps; it's clearly not an ordinary coupe, because it has five doors and it seems to stand a long way off the deck; and, finally, it maybe isn't the nicest-looking thing to have issued forth in the world of EVs, or even from Ford.
Look, it's a totally understandable decision for Ford to apply the nameplate from arguably its most famous model ever to an all-new electric vehicle (EV), in order to draw added attention to this new venture. Sure, Ford has made EVs for the commercial sector before now, as well as one or two limited-build cars for various world markets, but this Mach-E is the firm heading boldly into an all-electric future with proper, mainstream, series-production EVs. So the use of the Mustang epithet probably looked like a really good idea on paper, a sprinkling of muscle-car glitter for what is, when you boil it all right down to the essential reduction, a planet-saving, zero-emissions, sensible family crossover.
It's merely that this lightbulb moment which took place in a Ford boardroom somewhere in Detroit hasn't quite translated 100 per cent successfully to reality in the UK. The Mustang connotations do not mean the Mach-E is pretty; in fact, the need to slavishly make this EV SUV (can we just write 'SUEV' from now on, please?) look like the Yankee legend has perhaps done the vehicle a design disservice. With a long wheelbase in a big body, and with an attempt to shoehorn distinctive Pony Car graphics onto the frame of what is clearly a coupe-crossover-SUV, the finished article can look ungainly from certain angles. It's a piece of penmanship that makes the 19-inch wheels of our test car look small in their housings, and one which clearly needs a bright colour to have the Mach-E at its visual best. Carbonised Grey is an exclusive body colour for the Mustang Mach-E and it costs a thumping £1,150, but it's not the hue we'd be choosing for the EV. It doesn't exactly make the Mach-E's design sing.
However, we wouldn't say it was an overtly ugly car either, and redemption soon comes when you operate the unusual E-Latch doors - featuring a round, illuminated button-switch to open each one and, on the front two items, also a couple of odd metal brackets affixed to the sills of the windows which serves as door handles - and then clamber into what is not only Ford's finest car interior and human-machine interface that we've yet seen, but also one of the nicest cabins of any EV going. It's minimalist in its design and, if you're against this sort of thing, it's one of those switchgear-free zones in which every feature of the car is loaded onto a central touchscreen. But boy,
what a touchscreen. This is SYNC 4 software presented on a gigantic 15.5-inch portrait display and it works like a dream. Every graphic on it is super-crisp, the response rates are excellent and the layout of all the key functions means that you're not gnashing your teeth in fury every time you want to change the temperature of the dual-zone climate control by a degree, or knock your heated seats down a notch. It also has one great function that tells you how your energy was used from the battery (as in, on the climate control, on the route, on electrical accessories and on the ambient temperature outside) during each and every drive, which should help 'coach' owners into extracting more range from their Mach-E as time goes on. Anyway, we're sure there will be some who will still lament the increasing digitisation of car interiors in the 2020s/EV Age, but try the Ford's tablet out and you'll see that, done right, these things can work beautifully.
The screen is aided and abetted by wonderful material finishing, plus some of the best fake leather upholstery in any car to date. It's called Sensico, it features sporty red stitching in this model and if Ford hadn't told us that it
wasn't made of the skins of deceased bovids, we'd have been none the wiser. Pleasingly ethical
and upmarket. But there's more goodness, like a massively roomy passenger compartment (thanks to that 2,972mm wheelbase), a decent rear cargo area plus an 81-litre front boot that's got a swillable MegaBox-type drainage feature to it like the one found in the back of a
Ford Puma, and then our favourite item, that 10.2-inch digital strip behind the steering wheel that serves as the instrument cluster; it shows you exactly the information you need and nothing more in crystal clarity, and the velocity of the Mach-E is represented in 'Ground Speed', which is another nod to the Mustang. Therefore, this car can aesthetically be described as 'fantastic interior, not so sure about the exterior'.
How does it drive?
Another slight issue with the Ford Mustang Mach-E is working out where precisely it sits in the EV marketplace. It's one of those machines that's difficult to categorise, as in its lowlier specifications then on price and performance, vehicles like the
Hyundai Kona Electric and the
Volkswagen ID.4 in their higher trims are nipping at the Mach-E's heels. At the other end of the Ford SUEV's food chain, it doesn't seem to have the figures or grandiosity to challenge the
Mercedes EQC,
Audi e-tron et al, although the Blue Oval would probably hope you do think of the electric Mustang crossover as premium enough to be operating in that sort of realm. Presumably why there's a GT version of the Mach-E on the way, which'll have enough power to hit 62mph from rest in 3.5 seconds, apparently. Crikey.
For now, the EV it is most like in terms of its overall package is the majestic
Polestar 2, although we should perhaps outline the Mach-E's UK range to give some more clarity to its place in the world. There are two modes of drive (single motor, rear-wheel drive or dual motor, all-wheel drive) and two battery packs (Standard Range 75.7kWh gross or Extended Range 98.7kWh gross) to go at and you can have any combination of these features, giving you a core line-up of four Mach-Es. There is a fifth car, a bells-and-whistles, limited-run First Edition that is essentially an AWD ER variant with added toys; it's also the only one you can paint in Grabber Blue, if you fancy the eye-catching colour. Depending on whether you choose RWD or AWD, and which battery you have, the power outputs and performance of the Mach-E changes, so in simple list form, the line-up (with all prices quoted including the Government's £3,000 plug-in car grant on the models which are sub-£50,000) goes: RWD SR from £37,350, with 198kW (269hp) and 430Nm, a maximum range of 273 miles and a 0-62mph time of 6.9 seconds; AWD SR from £43,650, with the same 269hp output as the RWD SR but extra torque at 580Nm, and then a 248-mile driving range and 0-62mph in 6.3 seconds; RWD ER from £46,980, with a 216kW (294hp)/430Nm motor, a range of 379 miles and a 0-62mph time of 7.0 seconds; and, finally, with a big leap up in price because they don't qualify for the PiCG, the £57,030 AWD ER and then the £58,030 First Edition, both of which have 258kW (351hp)/580Nm dual motors, leading to a driving range of 335 miles and a 5.8-second 0-62mph time. Incidentally, all five Mustang Mach-E models top out at 111mph, irrespective of spec.
Therefore, you can see where you need to go in the line-up depending on what you want most from your electric Mustang. If you need more driving range than anything, you want the RWD ER. If you think a Mustang, powered by either volts or a V8, ought to be quick, then you want the AWD ER/First Edition versions. If price is your primary motivating factor, the only sub-£40k Mach-E is the RWD SR. It's fairly simple to fathom.
Which kind of leaves our test model, an AWD SR, as the one which has the least obvious appeal. It has no outstanding metric compared to its stablemates, save one - and it's an unwanted one at that, because this is the Mustang Mach-E which promises to go the shortest distance on a single charge of its battery, at 248 miles. Case in point: it turned up for testing with us on a cold, early spring day with the temperature in single digits, and with 100 per cent of battery onboard its digital cluster was claiming it would manage a maximum 204 miles before it needed plugging in again.
Admittedly, it's fairly accelerative in the Mach-E world, its 6.3-second 0-62mph time only beaten by its much more expensive ER-variant AWD siblings, and because it has the joint-maximum torque of any Mustang EV at 580Nm then it's pretty damned effective in the midrange, too. If you think of it as the best all-rounder of the Ford's line-up, you can start to appreciate it a little more. Although we should point out another small discrepancy in the Mach-E stable, which is that SR battery cars like this (which have about 68kWh of usable capacity) can only charge at a maximum 115kW on a DC connection, whereas the ER versions (88kWh usable) can go to 150kW. Having said that, it's the SR cars which go from 0-80 per cent quicker on any model's maximum charging rate (38 minutes instead of 45) and also they're slightly less lengthy to rejuice on a 7.4kW AC socket (11 hours instead of 14 hours), simply by dint of the fact their battery 'tanks' are physically smaller in the first place, but this is also the Mach-E of all five which puts in the least amount of driving range every ten minutes it is hooked up to a full-speed DC recharger: you get 52.8 miles in the AWD SR, compared to 56.5 miles in the RWD SR, 66.5 miles in either of the two AWD ER models, and a more impressive 74 miles in the long-distance RWD ER.
With all this evidence stacking up against the AWD SR in mind, it's refreshing that we can actually say we loved the way it drove, with again the caveat that there's nothing about it that feels particularly Mustang-ish, even allowing for the lack of a Coyote 5.0-litre under the hood. But as a comfortable, suitably swift and assured performance SUEV that won't make you sick every time you accelerate full-bore, this thing is superb. And we'd probably be giving it a higher mark if Ford had taken a bit more of a risk, dropped the attempt to piggy-back off the Mustang's 55-year-plus heritage and instead just called this the
Kuga Electric.
Our comment above about nausea is that, if you go in an EV that's really, really potent and fast, like the magnificent
Porsche Taycan Turbo, then when you deploy full power there's a disconnect between the outrageous rate of acceleration that's suddenly ensuing and the total lack of aural drama to go with it that can make you feel like someone is scrambling your brain with an enormous invisible cocktail stirrer. The Mustang Mach-E is not like that. It can shove you back in your seat from low speeds with that instant surge all EVs possess, and it'll also roll on extra pace smartly from the midrange if you ask it to, but it doesn't attempt to rearrange the innards of your skull while doing so. It also won't just keep on ferociously hauling for 100mph, the pick-up dropping away noticeably at about 60mph, and that frankly makes it a most pleasant EV to be travelling around in.
There's also a chassis of genuine talent underneath all of this 2,086kg of mass. Well-timed plants of the throttle (if you can even call it such a thing on a car with no internal combustion engine) will see the back end kicking out nice and progressively, which does at least make the AWD Mach-E feel rear-biased; this being about its most Mustang-y trait of the lot. There's also lovely steering with none of that claggy self-centring that has afflicted
a few Fords we've tried recently, brakes which are supremely well-judged in terms of balancing their dual duties of regenerative energy harvesting and actual stopping power (but don't select the One Pedal Driving mode idly, because it needs some serious finesse on the part of the driver to make the Mustang EV drive smoothly), and body control which allows a fair bit of lean but is in truth damned impressive considering the broad remit of operating parameters the Mach-E must meet. On the contrary to impressive dynamics in the corners, it's also an incredibly comfortable and refined vehicle to travel in for the majority of the time you're in it, the only real downside being a low-speed ride that becomes a touch too crashy and noisy on poorly paved roads in urban areas. But if you're buying an EV as a pure city commuter car, there are far better options available to you than the Mustang Mach-E - such as the
Honda e and the
Fiat 500, for instance. So we'd say the blend of the Mustang's handling and refinement levels is just about spot on.
And real-world energy usage? Decent on the Mach-E AWD SR, if our test was anything to go by. It did 107 miles in total on mainly rural A- and B-roads, in temperatures that were cold. For one of the drives that made up the bulk of its mileage covered, the Mustang EV was not driven sympathetically in the slightest (in fact, it was driven like an oversized
Ford Fiesta ST and it was still showing 2.7 miles/kWh; at the moment, anything like three miles/kWh is 'good' economy from an EV). Or, to put it another way, while we might have only been able to get 150-160 miles out of the Mach-E AWD SR if we totted up the mileage covered and the mileage still showing on the display with 24 per cent of the battery remaining when we handed it back to Ford, we were driving it very hard, in conditions that do not suit EVs, with loads of electrical drains running in the cabin. With that in mind, driven more 'realistically' on a regular basis, a real 200 miles per charge wouldn't be out of the question for any half-competent driver. And this is the 'short-range' Mustang EV, remember...
Verdict
The only two confusing things about the new Ford Mustang Mach-E are: why did Ford call an SUEV a Mustang; and who will pick the AWD SR from the range, out of all the seemingly better alternative models Ford provides? Those points aside, and notwithstanding the unusual exterior styling and an occasionally crunchy city-speeds ride, the Mach-E is a quite brilliant opening EV gambit from the Blue Oval, complete with a classy and capacious cabin, a phenomenal infotainment system and enough driving talent to ensure any petrolhead making the move to zero-emissions motoring ought to be suitably happy. We look forward to further drives in the Mach-E family in the future, to see how this highly promising and deeply likeable electric 'Pony Car' will develop from here.
Passenger Space
