First Drive: 2015 Ford Mustang

The Angeles Crest Highway leads high up into the mountains that border LA to the North in a series of sweeping curves, cracked pavement, and an occasional rock lying in the middle of the road. Here, the Ecoboost Mustang is fast. Really fast, biting into the corners with excellent front-end grip and blasting out of them with stonking low-end torque. Downshifting is really up to the driver – while the four is fizzy enough up in the rev-range, it’ll also happily pull from as low as 2,000 rpm without lag or stutter.

These roads are as scaly as a shed snakeskin, and where the live axle of the previous model Mustang would have given that car a skittish rear like there was a burr under its saddle, the new car just irons out the bumps and goes. It’s smooth, effortless speed, and when we come around a corner to find a rock sitting a few feet inboard of the yellow line, it’s mild wrist-work to tuck the Mustang in closer to the road’s edge and squeeze on by without checking our pace.

2015 Ford Mustang, 2.3L EcoBoost. Click image to enlarge

Impressive, surely, but for me the real excitement is what lies under the hood, or rather what will lie under the hood as soon as these things start getting to market. As it’s built to accommodate a V8, there’s plenty of space under the Ecoboost Mustang’s bonnet for bolt-on parts, and looking at the mild kink in the downpipe coming off the turbocharger, there’s easily another hundred or so horsepower to be unlocked with mild tuning. Official figures indicate it’ll hit 10.6 L/100 km in the city, 7.5 L/100 km on the highway, it’s $27,999 to start, and there’s nearly unlimited tunability here. That’s Mustang territory all over, even if the Ecoboost’s current demeanour is a polished friendliness rather than wild-child fun.

Pairing this poise with the automatic gives you a car that, hey, is still actually pretty fun. Driving a base automatic Ecoboost Mustang for a few quick loops revealed a car that has plenty of point-and-squirt zip. The standard paddle-shifters are nice enough, but if you’re buying this car as a driving tool, you’re going to want the six-speed manual. The automatic shifts pretty quickly, but it does further blunt a connection with the Mustang, and makes it a bit more of a cruiser – it’d be a nice choice for a drop-top, but take a stick to the coupe. Happily, according to Ford’s PR, it looks like many Canadians are making the right choice: fully 45 percent of Mustangs sold in the past few years have had three pedals and a stick-shift.