2024 Ford Mustang GT Review: It’s Not Over ‘Til It’s Over

For the past 20 years or so, we’ve all been living through an overlong funeral for the old-school performance car. If I had a nickel every time I saw or heard the phrase “swan song” or “last of the breed” to describe a made-against-all-odds, big-engine, analog fast car, I’d have enough money to buy said fast car.

But you know what? It’s all kind of BS.

Granted, yes, on the road to electrification, there have been some casualties. The Dodge Hellcats are sadly retired and I don’t even want to get into what Mercedes-AMG did to the C63. But how many “last analog” Porsche 911s have we had now? How many “last V12” Ferraris have we seen? Remember Jeremy Clarkson’s famous 2009 Top Gear “review” of the Aston Martin V12 Vantage that said cars like it would likely “soon be consigned to the history books”? Yeah, so I drove a brand new 656-horsepower Vantage just a couple of months ago, and Aston Martin has announced that it will reintroduce a V12 to its stable. So much for swan songs.

All of this is to say it’s not over ’til it’s over, and the 2024 Ford Mustang GT with its unboosted, unassisted 5.0-liter V8 and six-speed manual gearbox is a car that understands this.

The Basics

Let’s be honest with ourselves, though: one of the main reasons you buy a car like this is the way it looks and, in that department, the redesigned Mustang hits its mark. Details are sharper and squintier than the old one’s but it retains the long, athletically phallic pony car shape. It’s particularly attractive from the back with appropriately huge haunches and a very sharp, very concave, almost exotic-looking bend in the trunk lid that looks like a royal pain to manufacture.

Inside, Ford has really stepped things up from the previous ‘Stang with a pair of massive screens: 12.4 inches behind the steering wheel and 13.2 inches in the center. These can be optioned to be connected within the same piece of glass, but they’re separate in this example. The screens themselves are sharp and high-quality, and the whole experience boasts some really cool Unreal Engine 3D-based animations, but the system takes a while to load when you first start the car.

While we’re on the subject of screens, though, I’d like to take a moment to appreciate this car’s ’80s Fox Body cluster mode that glows green at night. It is fake, it is silly, and it is pandering, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t a fun thing I basically had on for the duration of my time with the Mustang. Just today, Ford announced that an additional retro gauge mode replicating the clocks of the ’90s SVT Cobra will be made available in a software update coming August 17.

Alfa Romeo also has something similar and, if you ask me, every manufacturer with digital clusters and meaningfully retro clocks in its back catalog should be doing this—looking at you, Porsche and BMW.

The overall UX of this car is also quite well-conceived. There’s a dedicated button on the steering wheel to adjust steering weight (normal, comfort, or sport), dedicated steering wheel buttons for drive modes, the volume knob is big, easy to find, and uncomplicated, the screens are straightforward to navigate, and Apple CarPlay is huge. HVAC is controlled within the touchscreen too, which is a shame, but you can’t win ’em all, I guess.

It’s all ensconced in a cabin that looks and feels a lot nicer than the one it replaces. The steering wheel is flat at the bottom, the carbon-like weave trim is tastefully cool, the engine start button looks like that of a well-worn fighter jet or something, and the center air vents look like said jet’s afterburners. The seats are comfy, though the fabric isn’t as breathable as it could be. Even with air conditioning on, braving the notorious stop-and-go traffic of Toronto on a heat-warning summer afternoon made my back quite sweaty. The seats also squeak against the center console when adjusted—another throwback, perhaps, to this car’s jankier days.

Driving the Ford Mustang GT

Behind the wheel, the Ford Mustang has come a long way since its leaf spring era—that’s been the narrative since, like, the 2012 Boss 302, so let’s not feign surprise that this new Mustang isn’t a complete wet noodle in the corners anymore. But purely taking its predecessors as your point of comparison, the 2024 Mustang GT is indeed great to drive; it goes where you point it with sufficient precision, it stops when you tell it to stop, and even the Getrag manual shifter—a point of contention in the outgoing car—feels alright. It isn’t quite at the level of a shifter from Honda or, presumably, the Tremec in the Dark Horse, but it’s not bad. Auto downshift rev-matching works well but, of course, can be disabled if you like to do that stuff on your own.

This one was equipped with the Performance Pack which throws in a brace between the front shock towers, a Torsen limited-slip diff, wider rear wheels, and bigger Brembo brakes with additional cooling ducts. The PP also unlocks MagneRide, Recaro seats, and active exhaust as additional options, only the latter of which this tester had. Even with the Performance Pack equipped, though, I still take issue with anyone who suggests this car as a direct alternative to something like the Nissan Z, Toyota Supra, BMW M2, or in EcoBoost form, the Toyobaru twins and Mazda MX-5. The Mustang may be comparable to those guys on paper but, on pavement, it’s a pretty different animal.

The Ford Mustang is still very much a couch on wheels. A sports couch, perhaps, but a couch nonetheless. Steering, as I said, is precise enough but it’s not visceral or feelsome, it’s actually quite light- and dead-feeling. Similarly, the brake pedal gets the job done but isn’t ultra-sporty in feel either. It’s also still a car you drive fast with one eye proverbially looking over your shoulder.

In a Supra, I can take a highway on-ramp at a “spirited” pace with great confidence because the way that car drives means I know exactly what it’s doing at any given moment. With the Mustang, though, I could probably take the same ramp almost as fast, but there’s a sinister vagueness in the way it does so that keeps me from pushing quite as hard. No one wants to be the guy in the Mustang leaving Cars & Coffee doing their most stereotypical impression of a Mustang leaving Cars & Coffee.

Oh, and it’s also huge which certifiably doesn’t help.

Where that size is welcome, however, is in this car’s ability to travel across vast distances with great ease and comfort. Where the aforementioned competitors are mostly all-out sports cars, the Mustang GT is, at its core, a big, gravelly grand tourer—I mean, it’s in the name and everything. And that gravel comes from the other main reason you buy a car like this: that big V8. Yes, as Dodge transitions the Charger to straight-six or EV-only and the Chevy Camaro goes away completely, Ford is committed to the V8. In the Mustang GT, it’s a 5.0-liter naturally aspirated Coyote making the noises of a quintessential pony car and shoving you down the road with 480 hp and 415 lb-ft of torque.

As you’d expect, it’s an engine that sounds thoroughly burly and athletic but can be quieted down to something tolerable on the everyday grind with quiet mode. Being naturally aspirated, it has to be revved for it to show any sort of forward aggression—peak torque doesn’t arrive until 4,900 rpm. Thrown down an empty road at full throttle, it’s a quick car for sure, but you get the sense that that’s not really what it’s made for. Ford Mustang GT is made to cruise and, if needed, make some big V8 noises while it overtakes a Prius on the right. The ride is just on the right side of comfy. Never harsh but not floaty either.

Ford Mustang GT Features, Options, and Competition

Those who just want a Mustang for the aesthetic can get a four-cylinder EcoBoost which starts at a downright affordable $33,515 but if you want the V8 GT, it’ll be $44,455 to start which… is still not bad at all for what you get. The aforementioned Performance Pack costs $5,295 while a $2,000 “301A” equipment pack throws in an upgraded nine-speaker sound system, configurable ambient interior lighting, dual-zone automatic climate control, a power driver’s seat, heated front seats, and satellite radio. A 10-speed automatic transmission is a $1,595 extra.

Specced out like this Grabber Blue tester, the Mustang GT would cost $53,765 in the U.S., and Ford Canada’s price sheet has it listed for $62,490 CAD.

With the Camaro gone and the Charger, er, different now, the Mustang GT doesn’t actually have that many close peers anymore. The Toyota Supra is a handily better sports car but starts in the high-$50,000s while the BMW M240i is also $50,000 to start and quite different in vibe. The closest rival, then, would probably be the $44K Nissan Z. They’re both GT cars masquerading as canyon carvers, and they’re both wearing new skins hiding fundamentally old bones, but they both go about their respective business quite differently. V8 is easily more charismatic than VR, Ford’s manual shift action is somewhat preferable to Nissan’s, and so is the Blue Oval’s in-car tech, but the Z does steer better. If all you care about is handling, the Z still edges out the Mustang, but if it were my money, I’d probably take the Ford on the back of the Mustang’s, um, everything else.

Fuel Economy

Equipped with the six-speed manual, the Mustang GT is rated for 14 mpg in the city, 23 mpg on the highway, and 17 mpg combined. Over 330 mixed miles, I observed precisely 16.9 mpg, practically right in line with the EPA’s predictions. Naturally, these figures are worse than the six-cylinder Nissan Z and Toyota Supra, which get 20 and 21 combined mpg, respectively. The outgoing 6.2-liter Camaro, however, somehow ekes out 19 combined mpg.

Value and Verdict

As tempting as it is to cheesily herald the Mustang GT as the last bastion of the V8 pony car or something, it’s equally tempting to end a review of it with a reasoned overview of what it does better and worse than its competitors. But I’d argue that the 2024 Ford Mustang GT doesn’t really have any true competitors. And even if it did, it’s also one of those cars that transcends logical competitive analysis.

You buy a Mustang not because it’s “just as good to drive as a BMW” (it’s not, by the way) or “more powerful than the Supra for less money” (yeah, sure, I’ll give it this one) but because you simply want a Mustang and all that that name implies. For now, it’s the only attainable, front-engine V8 American coupe left and despite Ford’s chassis engineers’ best efforts, yes, it is still a capital-M Mustang. It’s big, it’s brash, it’s brutal, and yeah, it’s just a little bit dumb.

Nobody can predict the future. Maybe this really is the last V8 car of its kind, maybe it’s not. For the record, I genuinely don’t think we’ve seen the last of the Camaro—you can’t convince me a new V8 Camaro is one step too far for GM while it spits out V8 Corvettes making 1,064 hp from the other side of its mouth.

Maybe they’ll make a comeback when somebody figures out synthetic fuel in 2038. Maybe science and policy will irrefutably realize that niche passenger vehicles like this are just a drop in the climate change bucket and, like having a Big Mac on your deathbed, letting people enjoy more V8s during humanity’s dying years isn’t actually going to change anything. Or maybe cars like the Mustang become outlawed and, as a result, the ice caps unmelt, the planet grows a whole new ozone layer, we solve world hunger, and everybody lives happily ever after, forever and ever.

Maybe. Doubt it, though.

For now, let’s stick with what we do know. And what we do know is that the Mustang GT is here, it’s great, and if you’re looking for a big, loud, comfy grand tourer that screams Americana, for now at least, it’s the only game in town.

Got a tip or question for the author about the Mustang? You can reach him here: chris.tsui@thedrive.com