Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
2023 Mustang keeping its V8 motor – for now
THE NEW Ford Mustang is set to surface next year, a company executive has confirmed, and fans can also rejoice in the news that there will still be a V8 version despite the motor industry’s rapid shift towards downsizing and electrification.
Ford Performance director Ali Jammoul recently told Australian motoring publication Wheels that the V8 has been really successful in the Mustang, but that the company needed to make it more eco friendly in order to cope with increasingly strict emissions regulations.
“I don’t think the V8 is going away soon; at some point with electrification and with BEV you can do a lot more in terms of performance and that might be the time that V8s start to phase out. But I see Mustang continuing to carry the V8 for now,” Jammoul told Wheels.
However, he did state that any future battery-powered Mustangs
would deliver the “DNA and essence” of the pony car nameplate.
“Clearly the Mustang nameplate is
a brand that’s here to stay and we will look at every potential opportunity to add series and that could be electrifying. Right now I can’t share anything but we’re definitely looking at it.”
Furthermore, those that like their ’Stangs with a good old fashioned stick shift might soon have to learn to live without their preferred manual gearbox option. “You know, eventually it’s going be phased out, right?” Jammoul told Wheels.
“But as long as there’s a market for it and customers still want that higher performing feel, it’ll stay, but clearly you can deliver a lot more from an automatic, especially from EVs. When we go to an EV strategy the immediate instant torque you have, you can never match with a manual gearbox.”
But before we see fully electric Mustangs there will almost certainly be hybrid versions.
Autocar reported back in 2020, citing inside info and patent drawings, that the next-gen Mustang was likely to offer a hybrid system that pairs the
V8 motor to a pair of electric motors mounted on the front axle, effectively giving the pony car all-wheel drive capability. We’d imagine, however, that if this is the case, Ford will still offer it with some form of drift mode that allows for RWD powerslides.
The new Ford Mustang is likely to follow an evolutionary design path, as the latest spy pictures of disguised prototypes imply.
But while the Ford Mustang in its more traditional format remains safe for at least one more generation, Ford is pushing ahead hard with an electric strategy that also involves the iconic Mustang nameplate.
The Mustang Mach E GT was launched back in 2021, and at the end of last year Ford announced that it planned to triple production of the battery-powered SUV product, that some see as being sacrilegious, due to overwhelming demand.