Living with the Ford Mustang Mach-E: Long-term review

2024 Ford Mustang Mach-E long term review

JUMP AHEAD

• Welcome
• Part 2: Coming soon

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Welcome

• Model: Ford Mustang Mach-E
• Price as tested: $89,990 + on-road costs
• This month: 1100km

I have a feeling that this one might be a bit controversial. There just don’t seem to be too many fence-sitters when it comes to the Mexican-built Mustang Mach-E and that largely comes down to the idea of the car rather than the nuts and bolts of it.

I have to say that I don’t really buy into the Mustang branding. The Mach-E feels as if it has more in common with a latter-day interpretation of a Mondeo than a Mustang. It’s not cheap either. This single-motor Mach-E Premium was, at launch, lineball with the dual motor Tesla Model Y Performance, both wearing a c.$91K price tag.

That’s until Ford backtracked and slashed almost five grand off the asking price to make it a little more palatable to Aussie buyers who’d thrown their hands up in horror.

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Thankfully it now comes in below the Luxury Car Tax threshold and is eligible for Fringe Benefits Tax exemption when bought on a novated lease. That’s a good deal smarter.

The ‘original’ asking price was a backtrack in and of itself. Back in 2022, Ford’s CFO John Lawler said that rising commodity costs had wiped out the profit expected on the Mach-E. It was profitable at launch in late 2020, then lithium prices went up by 144 percent and the whole project went into the red.

The price of the Mach-E shot up and, you’d have to say, the whole project looked emblematic of a huge company blundering into a rapidly moving market it hasn’t really got a firm handle on.

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So it’s fair to say that this car has had a tough genesis and it would probably be understandable had the Mach-E proved to be a bad vehicle. But it’s clearly not.

Aussie-spec cars have been garnering cautiously decent reviews and in order to wrap my head around this intriguing vehicle, I figured that spending three months with one would give me the time to form an informed opinion to deliver to you, dear readers.

The child in me would certainly have opted for the top-spec dual-motor GT model, a car that at least delivers straight-line performance worthy of the Mustang branding, but given my unerring talent for running out of juice in electric cars, I figured it was probably a wiser decision to go for the Premium, the model with an extra 109km of range over the GT.

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The Mach-E experience takes some keying into.

Yes, I’d do without all-wheel drive, and the performance is brisk rather than properly face-warping, but at least I’d give myself a fighting chance of demonstrating to my partner that there was more to EV ownership than skulking around the bins in the back of a dimly-lit servo at night trying to locate a charger that had long since gone unserviceable.

The Mach-E experience takes some keying into. At first, the cabin seemed a bit sparse, and I still don’t understand why it needs vast B&O door speakers that mean you can’t carry a bottle in the door pockets.

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Likewise, it’s maddening that the two pads for mobile phones overlap at one corner, which means that you can’t sit two decently sized handsets flat on them.

Then there are the brakes. Whether it’s the handover from re-gen to friction braking or something else altogether, I found the brakes a bit snatchy. To that end, I’ve taken to switching the car into one-pedal driving mode and learning to drive it smoothly like that.

It means your pace will be more leisurely as a result, but I’ve come to enjoy that. I get more range from the car, I drive in a more considered fashion and everything feels agreeably serene. ¿Cómo está la serenidad?, as they might say in Cuautitlán Izcalli.

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