Ford's electric Mach-E outsold the gas-powered Mustang in 2024

> What makes a Real Mustang?

A RWD coupe that'll spin out and crash trying to show off leaving a cars & coffee.

It's not an inexpensive RWD car with a V8, for the most part.

It's an SUV that can't out-run a Tesla. It's barely faster than the 4-cylinder Mustang

(Except for the most recent model (2024) that you can finally get a performance add-on with ($995). The previous model only lets you accelerate for about five seconds under full power)

In my view, one of the critical components of these sort of golden-age low cost sports/muscle cars is hackability/repairability.

Nobody makes cars like that anymore. Even the ICE Mustang is a computer on wheels that requires professional dealer-provided software tools to work on. The concept of muscle cars accessible to the everyman for tinkering/souping up is basically dead now.

How have you been living without a car? Do you live in a huge city or something?

Then you're clearly not the Mustang demographic.

I think there's two kinds of "knows how to drive."

- There's the people you're talking about, who treat public roads like their own playgrounds with little regard for public safety or road laws.

- There's also people who will keep an eye on their surroundings, understand how weather affects driving performance (acceleration, braking, cornering) and when to use or not use automation like adaptive cruise

As long as we've got a car-centric society in North America I'm more than fine with more drivers falling into that second bucket but having to deal with roads in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal very regularly, most people just don't pay attention on the road.

It's still fun to push it (a little) on back roads, where the primary danger is to yourself. Just don't cross the double yellows and don't overtake your braking zone, e.g. speeding around blind corners.

And I highly suggest a day of performance driving lessons from your local HPDE club. It will help you understand what is going on with the car that makes it lose traction, and to unlearn some bad habits when that happens.

> I don't exactly know who it's made for other than ignorant first time buyers.

I've rented a couple Ecoboost Mustangs, and I see the appeal.

315 HP is enough. It's faster than a Mustang Cobra from the 1990s or Mustang GT from the early 2000s. With the premium interior, the car is a surprisingly nice place to be for two adults - about as nice as the last BMW I rented. The back seat is usable in a pinch, and cargo space is adequate for daily driving and road trips. Maybe the fuel economy could be a little better, but it's easy to do worse. If the steering feel wasn't nonexistent even on the hardest setting, I think I might want one.

Sales seem to be OK: 44000 cars a year for an an enthusiast-oriented car is a significant number.

> The statistics do not bear this out. In 2012 41% of people under 19 had a license. In 2022 49% of people under 19 had a license.

Maybe not Gen Z specifically but the general trend absolutely exists.

„The percentage of 19-year-olds with a driver’s license dropped steadily from 87.3% in 1983 to 68.7% in 2022, according to most recent data from the Federal Highway Administration.“ https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/teens-drivers-license-car-sale...

This also shows different numbers compared to your comment, where did you get those values?

Very few people got licenses during COVID (2021) then after COVID a lot of people did (2022) then the number of people getting licenses decreased.

If you are looking at a spike in 2022 as proof that the number of interested people isn't going down, I hope you have better evidence than comparing 2021 and 2022!

They could have called it the GT-64, seeing how it is 64 inches tall and out-accelerates the GT-40.

Yeah see, I do not even desire to have a mustang but appreciate the few V6 models I have driven. They do not go anywhere particularly fast, but they do so with great noise and style.

The idea of an electric mustang is not a non-starter. Electric vehicles can be fast as hell, if not terribly noisy.

But the fact that the electric mustang looks more like a Nissan Rogue than a Mustang car always threw me.

I guess my big take-away hearing that the eMustang sold well is that most people do not care much about cars compared to car guys.

I didn’t say it was right or wrong. Just explained why it’s surprising that it’s sold more to some people.

We're in a thread about how it's outselling the original. Regardless of the silliness of the branding, it clearly didn't flop.

I'm not sure if that's necessarily a fair assessment as Ford's laid out plan to get from the current 40% loss to 8% profit is pretty reasonable.

Of that 40 percentage points, 20 of them are directly attributable to economies of scale. As they sell additional units those costs will amortize out. i.e. the more they sell the less they lose.

They expect to pick up another 15 points via engineering changes that will unify a lot of parts between the different product lines. They apparently initially just focused on shipping the vehicles so each model has a lot of bespoke parts that could semi-trivially be reworked to de-duplicate them between product lines.

That gets you down to 5% losses. The bulk of the remaining 13 points they expect to pick up via battery design improvements and cost reductions in their supply chain.

And their stated deadline for this is the end of 2026 so it's not exactly like they intend this to take ages. Rather they expect to achieve this within a handful of model revisions.

If you lose 4 billion on the first car you sell and 40k on the 10,000th that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to lose money on the 1,000,000th one you sell even if nothing else changes.

People talk about EV’s underperforming etc, but there’re still steady year over year increases. They are just about to break 10% market share, and everyone sees the writing on the wall.

> there's no guarantee of how much, or how long it will take.

Where do we find these guaranteed risks and investments that you apparently know of?

What you describe is the nature, the purpose, the challenge of business.

> They're losing money on every vehicle they sell.

Unless I’m missing it, neither article shows the profit/loss of manufacturing the vehicle vs sales revenue of the vehicle itself, so we can’t know that. Even if it’s true, it’s not unusual when bringing up a new product as you optimise for scale.

> There needs to be a lot more R&D to get the vehicles to a price point that consumers will purchase them and they can actually make a profit.

Does there? Maybe all of the retooling and new assembly lines are done, all the designs are finished? Maybe not and they still have R&D budget left? They are also not operating in isolation - If another company comes out with a cheaper battery then Ford can just buy it with minimal R&D, they don’t have to invent everything themselves.

> Thus far, their R&D has been a net loss for the company.

I mean, that’s R&D? It’s an investment. The alternative is to do nothing and end up like Nokia. Even if they are losing money on every vehicle, “shipping fast” is better than not shipping at all and they can control the numbers. Most people want the 2nd or 3rd gen when all of the bugs have been worked out, so having units on the road lets you learn what doesn’t work.

What do you mean? They're already expenses on the balance sheet.