Review: Ford Mustang Mach-E

The name throws everybody. Inscribing “Mustang” on an all-electric four-door SUV was a provocative move. Despite the Mustang Mach-E sharing part of its moniker with Ford’s last remaining passenger car, the Mach-E shares nothing major with the internal-combustion-engine Mustang, aside from the family resemblance.

Even transposed to a four-door SUV form, the Mach-E looks like a Mustang, with angular design elements carved into its swooping, curved bodywork and beefy haunches over the rear wheels. The stance is squat and athletic.

There are four trim levels of Mustang Mach-E, with most offering the option of standard or extended range, and rear- or all-wheel drive. WIRED’s tester was an all-wheel drive, extended-range Premium, which has a sticker price of $57,800 before subtracting the $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs.

I drove the Mach-E on a 700-mile road trip from New York City to northern Vermont and back to see how it would fare on a long road trip with three hikers and their bundles of camping gear.

Photograph: Ford

The Mach-E mounts a touchscreen vertically in the center of the dashboard for controlling the heating and air conditioning, navigation, music, driving settings, and more. This all-touchscreen display eliminates most physical buttons, and it is becoming a standard design element in EVs, although the Mach-E’s 15.5-inch screen is a tad larger than most competitor’s.

The placement of the physical volume knob on the touchscreen’s lower edge was a major annoyance. Too many times, I’d be turning it and the edges of my fingers would hit the screen, accidentally toggling on the rear window defroster or turning on the heated seats. Aside from the ergonomics, the touchscreen’s user interface was fairly simple and intuitive, although perhaps inevitably not as clean as the Polestar 2’s Google-designed UI.

Sync voice commands let you avoid having to reach over and fiddle with the touchscreen during particularly harrowing bouts of driving, such as in bumper-to-bumper traffic or the rain. Touchscreens are harder to use without looking at them compared to the physical buttons they replace, so it’s nice being able to speak your commands to change the climate control settings, ask for directions, and handle the radio. 

Sync 4, which superseded Sync 3 in the 2020 model year, is shared across several Ford vehicles, so if you’re familiar with how it works in other recent Ford vehicles, you’ll know what to expect from its performance in the Mach-E. Sync 4 misheard the occasional command and I’d have to speak clearly and deliberately to make sure it heard me correctly, but it wasn’t anything more faulty or frustrating than most new-car voice commands or a Google Nest (which isn't high praise).

I spent many hours hanging out in the Mach-E while it charged, listening to music through the touchscreen and planning the rest of my trip. There’s a mode akin to “accessory mode” in an internal-combustion-engine car, where the motor is off but the touchscreen, sound system, and heating and air conditioning continue to work so you can use the interior features when you’re not driving anywhere. It has a time-out function that enables it to turn off after a while, but it was annoyingly finicky.

Sometimes it would be fine and turn off after an extended period, and I’d just turn it back on so I could return to my music. Other times the system would turn everything off after only a couple of minutes, or it would turn off and then refuse to turn back on without any rhyme or reason. The charging breaks went by a lot more slowly when I was unable to listen to the stereo or use the heated seats in chilly Vermont.

Photograph: Ford

The Mach-E seats were among the most comfortable automobile seats I’ve ever sat in. Between testing cars for WIRED and my own personal travels, I’m often on the road for 10 or more hours at a time. There are very few cars I can sit in for eight straight hours, as I did on each leg of the New York-to-Vermont trip, without developing sore spots.

The synthetic leather upholstery was luxurious. At first, it fooled me into thinking it was genuine leather. The material is called ActiveX and doesn’t contain any animal products. Ford says the entire interior is vegan, so even beyond the seats, there aren’t any leather patches or panels anywhere in the interior. Polestar would do well to look at this superior vegan material.

There were small touches, too, that added up to an interior I’m more used to seeing in luxury SUVs. All the interior panels felt solid and were covered in soft-touch fabrics. The tiny rear-quarter window glass panels are purely for aesthetic ornamentation, but all these elements gave the interior a flavor of refinement.

Rearward visibility was very good, especially considering that today’s stringent side-impact and rollover safety requirements necessitate higher doors and thicker roof pillars, which makes driving most modern cars akin to sitting in a World War II pillbox.

Because all my parking is parallel on the streets of New York City, I appreciated how easy it was to see out of the Mach-E in all directions. Aside from the touchscreen issues, Ford has knocked it out of the park when it comes to the interior design and materials.

Photograph: Ford

On the long stretches of open highway, the Mustang’s range estimator was adequately accurate when I wasn’t switching frequently between wide-open highway speeds and stop-and-go traffic. But, as with most EVs, take the remaining range estimates with a grain of salt.

Whenever the range estimator hit “80 miles remaining,” I’d know it was time to fire up PlugShare through the car’s touchscreen and find a nearby charging station, because at that point I could expect to lose 2-3 miles of estimated range for every actual mile traveled.

Ford also loops you into its own charging network, BlueOval, which comprises over 70,000 charging stations in the US and more than 300,000 in Europe from a handful of charging companies. Through the BlueOval smartphone app, you can monitor your charging progress away from the Mach-E or change settings, such as charging speed. In the car, you can select a “Power My Trip” navigation option that routes you via charging stations when you’ll need them, based on your estimated remaining range.

Most fast chargers limit you to a one-hour period of power, which is not enough to fully charge the batteries of many EVs. The Mustang Mach-E was no exception, but if I pulled into a fast-charging spot of about 50 kW with 20 percent of the Mustang’s battery charge remaining, I would leave an hour later with close to 80 percent of the battery recharged.

Maximum range varies based on the trim level, standard- or extended-range package, and whether you choose rear-wheel or all-wheel drive, but it runs the gamut from 224 miles to 314 miles, which was updated from 305 miles for the 2022 model year. 

With the widespread coverage of EV stations in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, I never felt like I would run out of juice because of my tester’s 277-mile range. I’d typically drain the battery down to 20 percent, charge to 80 percent, and then drive off again, because the battery will retain more of its performance for longer if you don’t charge it to full or run it empty often. It's also often faster to charge twice to 80 percent than once to full. With all that in mind, I was getting about 180 to 200 miles between charges.

Photograph: Ford

Like range, power and performance vary based on trim level and powertrain options, but my loaner Mach-E Premium could reach 60 miles per hour from a standstill in 4.8 seconds (a figure provided by Ford) and offered 346 horsepower and 428 foot-pounds of torque to move the roughly 4,900 pounds of SUV. There are three laughably named driving modes you can select through the touchscreen: Whisper, Engage, and Unbridled, ordered from least to most responsive.

The supposedly highest performance mode, Unbridled, was unusable. Throttle response was so incredibly binary that it turned the accelerator pedal into an on-off switch. I could’ve touched it with a feather and the SUV would still lurch forward. Smooth acceleration, especially from a standstill in city driving, was impossible. I’ve driven sports cars and race cars with responsive throttles, but this was beyond that. At highway speeds, it was just about manageable but still unpleasant.

“Engage” was my preferred mode, and it was still plenty fast. Whisper was more purposefully lethargic, in order to smooth out the accelerating forces, but any half-skilled application of the accelerator pedal in Engage would suffice. Selecting each mode also triggers changes in ambient lighting and, in Whisper, turns off the false engine noise that’s otherwise played throughout the interior.

There’s also one-pedal driving, in which lifting your foot off the accelerator pedal slows the car down via regenerative braking. It allows you to do much of your driving without using the brake pedal, although you still need to use it for emergency braking and to come to a stop. It’s optional, though, and you can toggle it off so you can coast when you lift off the accelerator, like a regular old internal-combustion-engine car.

At 186 inches in length, the Mustang Mach-E is about the same size as the Jeep Cherokee or BMW X3, yet it weighs about 400 to 700 pounds more than those when similarly equipped and optioned out. EVs typically weigh more than their internal-combustion-engine counterparts, due to the weight of the batteries, but that heft is situated lower to the ground. That lower center of gravity tends to (though not always) lend a handling advantage.

Ford tuned the Mach-E’s suspension to feel tight and responsive, but not so tight as to be jarring over uneven pavement. While it feels extraordinarily fast for an SUV and has sporty handling, you notice every one of those pounds while maneuvering it. It doesn’t handle like a Mustang, but you could say it handles like the Mustang of SUVs.

We’re well into the era in which EVs need to be more than curious playthings if they want to replace internal-combustion-engine vehicles. The Mach-E’s roughly 300-mile range, depending on options, gives the car the legs to journey far from home on longer trips without inducing range anxiety, and its battery is sufficient to handle several days of errands and commuting even if you don’t recharge it every night.

There are some issues, though, such as that touchscreen volume knob, the iffy range estimator when it’s low on charge, and the timeout function that kept shutting the interior functions down while charging. Also, the charging port door on the front left fender was temperamental, and it often took five or six attempts to close it.

Overall, these issues were outweighed by a fantastic interior, a fun-to-drive chassis with a powerful motor, and a simple and intuitive touchscreen UI.

If you succumb to the allure of the most practical Mustang of the last 57 years—and, gasp, an all-electric one, at that—get ready for the public attention that comes with driving one. And to answer questions about the name.