He added: “The latest Mustang in Europe has gained another level of popularity, so we have a bigger base for the Mustang brand. The Mustang and the Porsche 911 are the most famous sports cars on the planet. Mustang is a big nameplate and it’s about time we applied electrification to it.
“People now understand we can do different things to different nameplates quite successfully.”
Ford is also working on new EV projects to follow the Mach-E, but Gueler added that they wouldn’t simply produce new Mustang-inspired EV models of different sizes.
“We don’t want to take a Russian doll approach, where you can’t tell them apart other than the size of the car, but we want a family feel where a Ford EV starts to build off this concept,” he said. “But we’d never do a smaller version of this – if we did a smaller vehicle it would have different proportions.”
Q&A: Murat Gueler, Ford of Europe design chief
Question: How did you approach the design of a Mustang-inspired EV?
Answer: “It’s not literal, just inspired by. It’s about doing it in the right way so it’s not too banal and people go ‘oh, they just tried to copy a Mustang’. We wanted some of that cool design. You can look at this and see it’s not a normal combustion-engined car, but it has some of that Mustang flavour.”
Question: Was the plan always to make your electric SUV a Mustang?
Answer: “This started as another project in around 2014, and about two years ago it switched to this. The design had a big influence: the whole structure changed, the technology inside changed. We rebooted the whole programme. The designers came up with this concept and everyone went ‘oh, this is good’.”
Question: While it uses the Mustang logo, there isn’t a single Blue Oval on the car. Why do that for such an important car for Ford?
Answer: “We did our research and customers are totally okay with this. It’s the same on the Mustang itself, and it communicates how unique this car is.”
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