Mustang GT and Mach 1 Get LESS Horsepower for 2022
We’re not talking 1970s-style slashes to performance here, but the drop in power speaks to the current climate.
Generally, when we hear about a new model year Mustang, everything either stays the same, or gets slightly tweaked. Most of the time, said tweaks are improvements, even if they might not be perceptible to 90 percent of the folks that’ll get behind the wheel. But most of the time doesn’t mean all of the time, and earlier this week, our friends over at Ford Authority revealed that for 2022, both GT and Mach 1 Mustangs will actually produce less power than similar models from the previous year.
The drop in power and torque is minimal, and cuts output by just ten on both counts. That means the GT will ship with 450 horsepower and 410 lb-ft, and the Mach 1 will produce 470 and 410 lb-ft. So it’s not like we’re looking at 1970s-era performance downgrades. And for the record, both manual and automatic models will be impacted. Given that Ford has offered no official explanation for the cuts, the smart money says this interesting delta is due to emission regulations. Because as the old saying goes, “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.”
What’s really curious about the whole situation is that the Shelby GT500, which makes a planet-twisting 760 horsepower and 625 lb-ft, will see no power drop. There’s no explanation for exactly why this unhinged beast wasn’t affected by the tweaks, but I’d be surprised if production numbers don’t have something to do with it. Because while the standard GT starts at a reasonable $36,120, and the Mach 1 comes in at $52,720, the GT500 starts at $70,300. So you’d expect the Blue Oval will sell a lot fewer of them.
Personally, I find this whole situation tremendously interesting. Because it’s one of the first examples of how we’re seeing modern internal-combustion mills being reigned in — not that it will have any real meaning when it comes to the driving experience. But since we know that the Mustang will be going all-electric in 2028, it makes me wonder what kind of power levels we’ll see from the green machine. We’ll have to wait and see, but given the tremendous potential of electric powertrains, I wonder if this might be the rare case where the end of the old tech isn’t better than the beginning of the new tech…
Photos: Ford
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