SO, WHAT WAS FORD THINKING?
David Booth says new Mustang Mach-e getting a swift and punishing reaction. It did not take a Nostradamus to predict that rage would ensue and controversy follow the Mach-e everywhere it was discussed.
LOS ANGELES “Who thought it was a good idea to use Mustang branding on this thing?”
“For crying out loud, Ford, call it something else!”
“Why does Ford make Edsels all the time? At least fix the grille.”
The reaction to Ford’s new Mustang Mach-e was swift and, judging from the comments posted on Driving.ca, punishing.
Nor was the rest of the Web any kinder. News of the Mustang Mach-e fairly lit up on the internet and virtually all of the reporting/commentary/indignation centred on the Mach-e’s surname.
If Ford was trying to set the stage for the start of its journey to an all-electric future, it resolutely failed. One reader,
Skip Hubert, probably captured the (almost universal) consensus best: “That’s as bad as the Mustang II. What were they thinking? Call it the Mach-e but don’t ruin the Mustang name again.”
Nor, it seems, was the reticence at broadening the Mustang brand — that’s my polite turn of phrase; more than a few of the truly incensed called it a “whoring out” of the Mustang name — confined to readers and customers.
Driving’s Matthew Guy captured the (sometimes extreme) discomfort within Ford to name its new all-electric SUV Mustang within Ford’s headquarters.
According to Guy, even Bill Ford himself initially had issues — “No, I’m sorry, I don’t want to hurt the brand. This is not going to be a Mustang,” — and numerous Mustang engineers simply refused to work on the Mach-e.
Like everyone else, it seems, they were left wondering what the hell Ford was thinking.
To be truthful, I was of the same mindset, convinced that branding any SUV “Mustang”would be a disaster: It did not take a Nostradamus to predict that rage would ensue and controversy follow the Mach-e everywhere it was discussed. Nonetheless, I think there was method to Ford’s madness. And here, I suspect, is the (ruthless) calculation it made:
The first part of the calculus involved the very Mustang owners and fans who are so enraged. They are legion and, as we can see (and always knew), they are loyal. So loyal, I suspect, Ford’s marketing mavens calculated that, no matter their outrage, no matter how betrayed they felt, they would never abandon their fealty to the most famous pony car of all time.
Mustang owners themselves have proven that justification providential. As reader Hubert so succinctly implied, if Ford loyalists weren’t about to dump their favourite pony car over the Mustang II, it’s doubtful the Mach-e was going to switch their allegiance.
Besides, where were they going to go? Camaro? Are you serious?
Have you met any Mustang owners? They’d sooner go through divorce and child estrangement than set foot in a Chevrolet dealership.
The addiction to new Mustangs is not easily broken, especially since the latest generation — the GT500 we recently tested — is so fine a representation of the breed. Mustang owners aren’t going anywhere.
More importantly, they are not the typical demographic that is going to buy a battery-powered SUV. So their umbrage, while certainly disconcerting, is probably inconsequential.
The second part of the equation is the people who might buy such a zero-emissions vehicle. And, if Tesla’s phenomenal success has proven anything, it is that EV buyers are particularly brand conscious (I was going to say shallow, but I am softening in my old age). Ford’s reasoning was that it would take a very large bullet to pierce the halo surrounding Tesla.
Mustang is, as we’re finding out, Ford’s best foot forward.
Besides the F-150, it is the vehicle most associated with Fomoco, the Ford that evokes the most universal praise and the one that projects the sportiest image — very important when you’re going up against the most dynamic nameplate in the electric-vehicle world. Oh, to be sure, Ford could have probably named the Mach-e Explorer or Ranger without evoking the consternation it now faces. But neither of those would have had the immediate brand recognition Ford knew it needed if it was going to go head to head with Tesla’s upcoming Model Y.
And that is undoubtedly Ford’s target. There is no way Ford is producing five distinct models of the Mach-e — and a total of nine different trim levels — for some halo vehicle/vanity project.
It plans on moving boatloads of Mach-es, if for no other reason than the fact that the BEV Mustang is the stepping stone to (probably) the most important single vehicle any automaker will release in the next five years — an electrified F-150.
To do that, it needed every tool in its box, every possible marketing advantage it could scrounge up, every possible blaring headline it could generate. It needed, to use a tired cliché, all hands on deck. That’s what the hell Ford was thinking.
Driving.ca