Ford CEO: It's the 'right time' to build the Mustang GTD supercar
Ford Motor Company has made supercars before — like the Ford GT that took on Ferrari at Le Mans and won. Now the automaker is taking the supercar recipe to its everyday Mustang pony car, featuring supercharged performance, and a supercar price of around $300,000.
The Mustang GTD, just debuted at Monterey Car Week, is basically the company’s Mustang GT3 race car, for the road — but it’s even more hardcore than the race car, if you can believe it. Ford says the GTD is powered by its most powerful V8 ever, a version of the GT500’s “Predator” 5.2 Liter supercharged V8, producing around 800 horsepower. In order to keep a preferred 50/50 weight distribution, Ford is using a rear transaxle, a first for a road-going Mustang, which will house an eight-speed dual clutch transmission.
“We didn’t want Aston Martin and Mercedes and Porsche to have all the fun with their cars,” Ford CEO Jim Farley tells Yahoo Finance from the Quail event here at Monterey Car Week. “And we think it’s kind of the right time for us to build Mustang at the higher end, the $300,000 range.”
Also a first for a road-going Mustang, the GTD will use the rear trunk space to house its all-new rear suspension and spring setup. Seen in race cars and super exotic road cars, the GTD was given an “integral link pushrod and rocker arm architecture,” where the car’s active shock absorbers and coil over springs are arranged in a horizontal cross pattern. It’s a very trick, race car setup, and definitely does not come cheap.
Indeed, this is no ordinary Mustang. While Ford wants to show the world what the company can do on the race track, the question becomes what buyers are willing to shell out $300,000 for a car that looks similar and is somewhat based on the $30,000 Mustang pony car.
That may be a question for another day, as the GTD, which for now is slotted in as a 2025 model year car, will be built in such a small quantity that it will likely be highly sought after among car enthusiasts.
Farley on Ford’s EV transformation, and UAW talks
Farley also discussed the latest on the company’s electrification efforts, which see production improving, but profits at this point still hard to come by.
“The [Model] e business, the volume is OK. We spent the first half getting ready to triple production in the fourth quarter, but the profitability is really challenged,” Farley said. “Thankfully, the other two businesses make more than enough to make up for that challenge, but what we’re seeing with [Model] e is that people just love the cars, but they don’t want to pay premium.”
Farley has been driving around the country in a Ford Lightning EV, trying to see what its like to live day in, day out with an EV. He believes most of the issues we face with the EV transformation are human issues – like planning, range anxiety, and things like that – but that doesn’t mean systems like the nation’s charging infrastructure don’t need improvement.
Another big challenge facing Ford are the current talks with the UAW, where the current contract expires in less than 30 days. The rhetoric has been heating up on the union side, and automaker industry execs believe the union’s demands are too extreme.
“It’s a really difficult discussion; to be frank, we’re far apart,” Farley says. Ford has much as stake as it has 20% more US workers than GM and Stellantis, but he is hopeful a deal can be struck. “I believe that Ford and the UW will find a way forward to guarantee a future for our manufacturing base in the country. And for the middle class, we have a lot of work to do in the next 30 days.”
And those workers, after a deal is struck, will be building cars like the $300,000 Mustang GTD. And debuting the car at the Quail event, during Monterey Car Week, in Farley’s mind is the right place for it — and its well-heeled attendees.
“We’ve never made a Mustang in this kind of price zone, and this is the right crowd — we want to sell $300,000 Mustangs, you got to be at the Quail, right?,” Farley says. “This is the right place —just like maybe a football game is the right place for an F-150 — this is the right place for this car.”
Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.
Click here for the latest stock market news and in-depth analysis, including events that move stocks
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance
