Mach. Mach. Who’s There?

Some brands should be left alone.

Muscle cars were a big deal when I was growing up. At the shop and local car shows, there were THE CARS… the ones everyone wanted the keys to. GTO Judge. Chevelle Super Sport.  Hemi ‘Cuda. Mach I Mustang. These are just a couple of the icon brands that rolled out of Detroit in the mid- to late 60’s. To this day, when you speak these sacred names, car guys (and gals) can hear the roar of glass packs and smell the burning rubber. They were, and remain, powerful automotive brands.

Car manufacturers have been trying to tap back into the nostalgia around those popular brands. Chevy has introduced, and re-introduced, Camaro and the Super Sport package several times. Dodge revived the Challenger. Ford has kept the Mustang in its lineup since 1964. When Ford announced the return of the Mach, visions of smokie burnouts began dancing in my head. Then, I discovered it was the Mustang Mach E. An all-electric Mustang.

Sacrilege!

Where’s the Shaker hood scoop? The black-out hood with hood pins? The chin spoiler up front and the salami slicer on the trunk? That’s the Mach I know. An E-Stang is NOT the brand that’s been etched in my brain for over 50 years! It has a receptacle instead of a gas cap!

Kudos to Ford for developing and introducing its first all-electric crossover… hug those trees. But what were they smoking when they decided to call it a Mustang… and then added the word Mach to it? It doesn’t resemble a Mustang… or a Mach I in any other way except for the Mustang logo they added to the front… which should be a honeycomb grille. Am I right? Mustang loyalists LOVE THE MUSTANG BRAND. I dragged my Mustang home in 1981, souped it up and still have it to this day. I love my Mustang. There are millions of Mustang lovers just like me that aren’t warming up to the newest pony in the stable.

Sometimes new things need to be all-new. Ford really missed the mark here (in my humble opinion). They could have created a new and exciting brand. Something that the next generation… the EV owners… would aspire to own. Just like I aspired to own a Mustang when the DMV blessed me with a drivers license way back when.

If I was the Brand Manager for Mustang, I would have said, “Oh, hell no!” to the idea of putting the iconic running ’stang on an electric pseudo station wagon. That’s just me. Let me know what you think.