I got to drive a new Mustang

[Hotrod46]

I haven't had a lot of time to work on the Healey since I've been helping my mother take care of things after Dad's passing, but thought I would post my recent experience with a new Mustang. Sorry, but it's a long post.

I just returned from taking Mom to West Virginia to spread some of Dad's ashes on the mountain where he was raised. Since Mom had not been able to do any traveling for about 12 years while caring for Dad, my wife and I decided to make a mini vacation of the trip for her. Mom always loved to travel and at 81, may not be able to do much in the future.

We stopped over in Pigeon Forge, TN on the way home. My wife and I go there occasionally to ride the motorcycle in the mountains and are a little familiar with the area. The Tennessee, Georgia and Carolina area has got to be some of the best motorcycle riding east of the Mississippi River (if you like curvy roads and we do). We did take in a dinner show, but weren't much interested in the "touristy" stuff in PF. Instead, we surprised Mom by renting a convertible Mustang to drive her around the mountains. She and Dad rode a motorcycle for many years and visited all 49 states in North America and several provinces in Canada. We thought the Mustang would be as close as we could get to a MC

We spent a couple of days sight seeing and even did the Tail of the Dragon (US 129 at Deals Gap). This is a very popular MC and sports car destination that advertises 318 curves in 11 miles. Pro photographers set up along the road and take pics of just about everything that comes by. The pics are available for sale on the net for souvenirs. We plan to get some of us in the car.

It was a good trip and Mom seemed to really enjoy it. Except for getting Dad's grave marker in place, this trip was the last big thing that had to be taken care of as far as taking care of Dad's funeral arrangements.

Now, about that Mustang. This was one of the newer cars that had the Eco-Boost turbocharged 4 cylinder and a 10 speed auto. The last turbo 4 banger that I drove was an SVO Fox body Mustang in the early 80's. That one had a manual trans. I was looking forward to trying out one of the new generation performance cars. The Eco-Boost 4 has been getting a lot of press and I wanted to see if it was as good Ford claims. I have to say that the new car was quite a bit more sophisticated than the old one, but 10 speeds seem a little much. It was fun to play with it like I wanted to without a salesman riding shotgun.

The new engine had surprising power on boost and didn't suffer from turbo lag as bad as the older car. It was there, but the new generation of electronics seemed to work hard to keep it bay most of the time. It would have been practically nonexistent if Ford would change the programming in the automatic trans. This car had the first "flappy paddle" (as Jeremy Clarkson calls them) shifters that I have fooled with. I've been driving standard transmission cars and MC's for almost 50 years and have developed that feel for what gear the engine wants. When I took over from the computer and shifted the Mustang myself, I was usually 2-3 gears lower than what the computer wanted. Driven like this, there was never any turbo lag. The engine stayed on or near boost and felt pretty eager considering it was a 4 banger hauling a fairly heavy car around. The computer short shifted all the time. The engine felt lazy because of it and it was very slow to down shift on it's own. Of course, Ford is more interested in fuel mileage and emissions with the transmission programming than performance and when I was controlling the transmission, it did seem to be a thirsty little engine.

The suspension felt pretty good considering it was a standard car and not a GT package. It took the curves well although I wasn't really pushing it hard because of my passengers, but we did do some very curvy roads. There was very little body roll and the thing felt pretty solid. I did feel tiny amount of cowl shake occasionally on really bad roads, but most any convertible will have some.

With all the electronics, the driver seat is a very busy place. The steering wheel is literally covered with buttons. There were controls for the dash display, radio, cruise control and more. I never did get the Bluetooth radio to find my phone and when I tried to connect it with a cable, I had to download an app to get the phone to communicate with the sound system. This app disabled the onboard navigation system when the phone was connected and used the Google Maps on the phone to navigate. When you're in the mountains with limited cell service, this can be a problem since Google Maps has to communicate over the net to figure out the initial route. The onboard system was stand alone. All it needed was access the GPS satellites. There may have been a way to get around this, but I didn't have time to figure it out and it wasn't very intuitive. What with the touch display screen and all the various buttons, it's pretty easy to get distracted while driving.

I guess it wasn't a bad car, but I probably wouldn't buy one. Especially, with the 4 cylinder/auto. If I did get the 4, I would definitely want a manual trans. The paddle shifters allow you to shift the auto, but the computer would take back over and upshift to too high a gear after a few moments. You could force it into sport mode and have pretty much full manual control, but since the paddles turned with the steering wheel, they were not always where you wanted them on a really curvy road. Any steering input that required you to reposition your hands on the wheel would move the paddles from their normal 9 and 3 position. I had to hunt around the wheel for them sometimes, while a standard trans would keep the stick in the same place all the time. Maybe this was just because of my driving style, but I didn't like it. Now the GT version with the 5.0 V8 and a 6 speed would be a different animal.