Ford Mustang 7th Gen

The S650 had to be drawn around what it kept. The roof, A-pillars and rear glass carry over from the S550, so the new car's identity had to be made at the ends, and exterior designer Chris Stevens made it there. Design manager Christopher Walter has described the brief in two words, edgy and sexy, and the edgy half won: a flatter, harder nose, sharp creases down the flanks, a cut-off tail. EcoBoost and GT wear different front fascias and bonnets, which is unusual for a Mustang and means the V8 car reads as the V8 car from the front for the first time in years. The tri-bar tail lamps stay, because they always do. The bigger change is inside, where the twin-cowl dashboard that had defined every Mustang since 2005 is gone. In its place sit a 12.4-inch instrument cluster and a large centre touchscreen, canted toward the driver and, on higher trims, sealed under a single curved sheet of glass. The GTD is the outlier: carbon bodywork, aggressive active aero, and a window cut into the rear bulkhead so the pushrod suspension is visible from inside the cabin.

For once the race programme and the road car share a shape and a name. Ford Performance and Multimatic built the Mustang GT3 on Dark Horse architecture and gave it its worldwide debut at the 2024 Rolex 24 at Daytona, took third in LMGT3 on its Le Mans debut that June with Proton Competition, and won the 2025 Rolex 24 outright in GTD Pro with the No. 65 car of Frederic Vervisch, Christopher Mies and Dennis Olsen. By May 2026 the GT3 had four IMSA wins and sixteen worldwide. There is a customer GT4 alongside it, and a single-make series, Mustang Challenge, running the track-only Dark Horse R, which took 40 cars to Le Mans for a support race in 2025. In NASCAR the Mustang Dark Horse became Ford's Cup body for 2024 and Joey Logano won that year's championship with it, though a Cup car is a silhouette and shares nothing structural with the road car. In Australia the Gen3 Supercar wears S650 bodywork: Chaz Mostert took the 2025 championship in one, and Matt Payne and Garth Tander won that year's Bathurst 1000, Ford's first since 2019.

This generation has spent its life being treated as the survivor of something. The Challenger stopped at the end of 2023 and the Camaro in January 2024, so a car that had spent six decades being compared with two rivals suddenly had neither, and the nameplate turned 60 that April. Ford's own position hardened as the segment thinned. At the Australian Grand Prix in March 2026, chief executive Jim Farley said the manual would only leave out of the company's cold, dead hands. Some of the culture is factory-issued now. The electronic drift brake is a manufacturer building a hooning device into a car it warranties, and Ford's work with Vaughn Gittin Jr's RTR operation put 1,300hp Formula Drift S650s into competition and then into Forza Motorsport as free downloads in October 2024. Police departments in Georgia, Idaho, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Virginia have put Mustangs into service and upfitted them in house, because Ford does not sell a police package. And the crash clip filmed leaving a cars and coffee meet, a genre the previous Mustang generation supplied generously, has not gone anywhere.

Most of this is still ordinary modern-car ownership, but the first two model years came with a lot of dealer visits. The 2024 car alone carries eleven NHTSA recall campaigns, and the ones owners actually noticed were software: a digital instrument cluster that could go blank, and a rearview camera that could freeze or fail to display in reverse. The hardware campaigns covered a fuel supply line, injectors missing O-ring support discs, a clutch pressure line, rear suspension knuckles and a body control module that let water in. Consumer Reports rated the 2024 car below average for reliability against its own model year. Rear differential failures have turned up on early cars, usually announced by a pop or clunk on lock, with replacement units slow to arrive; milky fluid at an early service is not one of them, since the clutch pack coating sheds during break-in. CV boots have failed on more than a few. Set against all that: no rust, most examples still inside a factory warranty, an improved MT82-D4 rather than the manual that drew the class action, and a Coyote that owners are supercharging rather than repairing.