Mustang Is a Vibe

The 2024 Mustang will be familiar. It’ll be powered by gasoline and hew to the template of Mustangs past. We’ll argue over the details, but the format is an evolution of the car that debuted in 1964. You ever hear the ragged bark of a V-8 revving out from a stop and just think “Mustang” without even needing to look? It’ll be one of those.

But, as the Mach-E indicates, Ford plans for a lot more cars called Mustang that aren’t the 5.0 coupe of your nostalgia. To which I say: Get over it.

This is actually a good thing, because Mustang is synonymous with fun, so if Ford builds more Mustangs, all that really means is that they’re trying to build fun cars. Or crossovers. Or whatever. If, in 50 years, we’re floating around in flying electric mobility pods, the Mustang will be the one that sounds like an F/A-18 and has a button to spray a contrail of skid marks across the sky.

A cranky faction of enthusiasts will always have a meltdown when their favorite car changes in any way. Certain Jeep people freaked when the Wrangler got coil-spring suspension. Some of the Porsche die-hards swore that if a 911 got a water-cooled engine, you might as well drive it in reverse and call it a Volkswagen Golf. I guarantee that there are salty Corvette fans out there who are sworn enemies of the C8, in all its mid-engine blasphemy. And the Mustang Mach-E immediately engendered a backlash from the 5.0 crowd. A four-door Mustang? That’s electric? And can carry shrimp where the V-8 should be? We shall refuse to ever call such an abomination Mustang! Why, it probably won’t even crash on the way out of Cars and Coffee.

But guess what? The Mustang Mach-E is fun. It’s fast, and interesting, and they built an insane drift car out of one just to show what’s possible. Because they called it a Mustang, you know what to expect, or at least where they wanted to go with the experience. There are four-cylinder automatic Fox bodies rolling around out there that have a hard time holding 65 mph uphill. They wear Mustang badges. So come on—it’s not exactly like a 480-hp four-door is desecrating a name that’s known nothing but greatness.

When people rebel against their favorite car changing, that’s essentially an expression of narcissism: “How dare you corrupt the idea that’s in my head about what this particular thing should be?” It’s an affront to their identity. As in, if I think a Mustang is V-8 powered and rear-wheel drive and seats four, how dare Ford build something wildly different and call that a Mustang too? Why, it’s almost as if I shouldn’t care so much about the moneymaking strategies of a gigantic faceless corporation!

The name “Mustang” is an attitude, not a format. We can argue about whether a given car lives up to the idea of a Mustang, but how it gets there is going to change. Maybe the 2024 Mustang will be the last one that shares its basic setup with the 1964 original. Maybe it won’t. But eventually, the Mustang as we know it will die. The idea, though, will live on—fast, fun, and a little bit juvenile. In whatever form it takes.