First Drive: 2015 Ford Mustang

You can’t see the stars in L.A. Well, you can, actually – you can pay your fifty bucks and get crammed cheek by jowl into an Econoline with the roof cut off and be ferried around Beverly Hills to look at houses the size of museums while some guy tells you boring stories on a crackly PA. “This is the tree where Brad Pitt leaned to remove a stone from his shoe on his morning run! That’s the stain where Paris Hilton’s chihuahua did its morning business!” That sort of thing.

But the stars themselves, those flaming balls of gas up there that remind us of the infinite size and potential of the universe, they’re gone. There’s too much sprawl here to see ’em, too much ersatz glitz and store-bought glamour and light pollution. It’s a sea of money and fame, weird fashion, big watches, sky-blue Bentleys, and fake columns (doric and ionic). I’ve got to get the hell out of here.

Oh hey, a five-litre ‘Stang. Yo, LA: word to your mother.

Fifty years after it debuted as a prettily trotting pony car, the Mustang is one of the two machines Ford makes (oh, they build others, but you know what I mean). There’s the F-150, which is how the Blue Oval goes to work, and there’s the Mustang, which is how it plays. Here’s the new one.

It’s wider, lower, more streamlined, and a little heavier with a new fully independent suspension. There’s still a V6 option, which’ll be decent enough next time you fly in somewhere and hit up Hertz, but there’s now also a four-cylinder turbo alongside that classic V8-plus-rear-drive formula. This is the Mustang Ford has built for the world.

On first trot around the paddock, she looks pretty good. While the Boss 302 had a bit of a rake to its suspension, this car retains some of that nose-up stance of the classics, and actually reminds me more than a little of the Mach II. It’s modern of course, so that means smooth lines, creased flanks, and a front end that wouldn’t look out of place on a Fusion.

You now get LED lighting front and rear, with gill-like bars for the daytime running lights and the classic sequential turn signals out back. 17-inch rims are standard on the base cars, sizing is available up to 20 inches on the V8s, and 19-inch blacked-out rims come standard on the performance packages. The hood vents are pushed a little forward but they remain functional, and there’s some clever functional aerodynamic trickery going on in the front fascia to make the car even slipperier.

2015 Ford Mustang, headlight. Click image to enlarge

If the exterior is polished, the interior is a complete renovation. It’s like Ford’s engineers had a to-do list of my personal nitpicks for the last car: goodbye chrome-look plastic everywhere; so long plastic wraparounds at 9 and 3 on the steering wheel. Even the trunk’s a little bigger.