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.

The main bar across the dash is actual aluminum, the gauges are now easier to read (and a bit lighthearted too – the speedo reads “Groundspeed”), there’s matte-look plastic instead of shiny stuff wherever possible, and they’ve even tucked a little flock-lined sunglasses holder to the left of the steering wheel.

Nobody’s going to buy a pony car for its infotainment, but the MyFord Sync system is workable once you know where the shortcuts are. The voice commands are the way to use it, but it does remain a tad slow in some operations, with font that’s too small for easy on-the-move operation. It provided straightforward enough turn-by-turn instructions when threading through traffic, but early in the day, when a wrong turn required some backtracking, trying to use the map’s zoom functions and so forth to find our way back wasn’t very effective. Had I not been behind the wheel, I would have just booted up the ol’ smartphone.

2015 Ford Mustang dashboard, centre stack vents, navigation. Click image to enlarge

First on the menu was the combination I was most interested in driving, a six-speed manual, performance-package Ecoboost Mustang. With a 2.3L turbocharged four-cylinder putting out 310 hp and 320 lb-ft of torque, it’s essentially making as much power as mid-2000s V8 ‘Stangs, and with a snoot-full of boosty torque at low revs to pull like a bigger engine.

Depressing the now-standard push-putton starter, the Mustang’s new global four-pot turbo fires up and settles into a far-off purr. You can barely hear the thing – there’s just a bit of a cheery whistle when you dip into the boost down low. Off we go through LA’s bump and shunt morning traffic, upshifting early and letting the torque do its thing.

The main characteristic of this new Ecoboost Mustang is that it’s easy to drive. Super-easy. My First Mustang levels of easy. While this is a relatively big coupe, with the turning circle of a barge, there’s less of a sense of interminable heft to the thing. The old car had a nose like Cyrano de Bergerac’s Michigan-born cousin, and it stuck it in the air anytime you got on the loud pedal. The new Mustang now controls its pitch and dive, bringing better behaviour to the table in exchange for some of that sense of drama.

Then you get it up and into those California canyon roads, and sweet sassy molassy, is she ever a beaut. Among some of the other new technologies Ford has fused into their half-century old pony car is the ability to toggle driving modes between normal, sport, track and snow & ice (there’s no Eco mode, as I guess that’d be dialing up the Mustang II factor a little too far). Normal is fine, tame, maybe a little dull. Sport firms up the steering and gives you better throttle response, and Track wicks everything up and turns off the traction control.

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.

And then there’s the 5.0. If the Ecoboost is the Mustang Ford built for the world, then this is the one they made for the hometown fans. It may have a horsie badge up front, but it kicks ass.

First of all, the Coyote V8 now cranks out 435 hp and 400 lb-ft of torque. There’s a weight penalty, to be sure, but immediately that introduces a bit more sledgehammer character back into the reborn icon.

2015 Ford Mustang 5.0L GT engine bay, shifter. Click image to enlarge

It’s a beast, and the only disappointment is that it’s not particularly loud. Oh well, it’s not like unleashing the Coyote’s yip, growl, and grumble isn’t two clicks on Amazon away. Meantime, drop the windows and walk on it.

Even whilst giving it the beans, the Performance Package–equipped Mustang has nearly all the same well-bred behaviour as the Ecoboost, just with a big, lusty V8 lunge. It tucks into the corner in much the same way, but in addition to letting the momentum and low-end power carry you through, there’s joy to be found in wringing that big ‘8 up into the redline. Ford’s managed to build that most-difficult feature into its Mustang, the feeling that the car is shrinking around you. Seriously, how much is this thing? Thirty-seven grand plus adding on the performance package? And I can get a child seat back there? Huh.

Meanwhile, most of my colleagues are taking advantage of Ford’s hey-don’t-do-a-burnout-but-here’s-the-button-for-doing-one-wink-wink-nudge-nudge policy and using the Mustang’s new line-lock feature to paint big rubbery elevens all over the canyon’s pull out spots. Hilarious, sure, but the Mustang’s no one-trick pony. A Challenger would be able to smoke ’em up too, but the Mustang’s the one that could gallop back down the hill and leave the muscle car sucking wind through the corners.

With brakes that are now up to the task, a suspension set up for carving the corners, an interior environment that doesn’t feel like your grandmother’s plastic-coated floral-print couch any more, and a choice of either the workhorse V6, the smart four, or the eight that’ll put a big goofy grin on your face, the new Mustang is the genuine article.

L.A. is full of things that are fake. The new Mustang is something real. It’s priced accessibly enough not to be an extravagance, but it still provides the thrills of a far more expensive machine. Drive it into the mountains. See the stars. Do a burnout that says, “I was here.” Then go drive it to work so you can pay for the damn thing.

Pricing: 2015 Ford Mustang
Base Price (V6): $24,999
Base Price (Ecoboost 2.3): $27,999
Base Price (V8): $36,999
Freight & PDI: $1,600

Competitors:
BMW M4
Chevrolet Camaro
Dodge Challenger
Hyundai Genesis