Tested! The 2024 Ford Mustang Mach-E Rally Is a Discount 911 Dakar
Didn’t get a chance to score a Porsche 911 Dakar? How about the same experience for 27 percent of the price?
Pros
- Absurdly fun
- Quick as hell
- Minimal upcharge
Cons
- Overheats too easily
- Charges too slow
- On the heavy side
At the core of automotive enthusiasm is the belief that cars often aren’t rational. No one really needs a Porsche 911, much less an off-road-capable 911, but boy, do we want them both. Objectively, there are better on-road sports cars and off-road vehicles than the 911 Dakar, but it’s a special brand of irrational fun, matched only by the similarly inclined Huracán Sterrato. Neither is in any way attainable, however, both because they each cost well over $200,000 and they’re already sold out. But if these cars light your enthusiast fire, there’s another, similarly irrational model that fits neatly into this niche, and it’s one that a working person can actually afford: the 2024 Ford Mustang Mach-E Rally. And, oh yeah, it’s an EV.
0:00 / 0:00
Trust Me, Bro
As one of a small cadre who’s driven the 911 Dakar, Huracán Sterrato, and Mach-E Rally fast off-road, trust me when I say the Mach-E Rally is the blue-collar answer to those quarter-million-dollar exotics. At just 27 percent of the starting price of a Dakar and 22 percent of the Huracán Sterrato, the Mach-E Rally is the smiles-per-dollar bargain of the century compared to those two.
Even better, it’s as if the same team set up all three cars. Maybe it’s because they’re all high-powered all-wheel-drive sports cars with mild lifts and chunky tires, but they all do the same wonderful trick. Chuck the Rally down a dirt road and into a corner, and it might as well cost three or four times the price. Lift off the accelerator abruptly right before you turn the wheel, and the Rally will pitch itself sideways into the corner with a lurid but easily controlled drift. Corner too tight for that? Come in easy, then step on it at the apex and power-oversteer your way out. Yes, being all-wheel drive, it’s easy to get too greedy at any stage of the corner and induce understeer, but half the fun is in learning the car, so you avoid it and provoke big, giggle-generating oversteer instead.
The key to it all is the Rally’s stability. As trivial as it is to get the car sideways, it’s just as effortless to control the slide. Everything the car does is predictable, and the controls, be they acceleration, braking, or steering, are exactly as responsive as you need them to be. It never snaps loose on you or feels out of control. Instead, it instills an immediate confidence that urges you to push it harder, faster. The new RallySport drive mode gives you ample leash while maintaining a safety net, but if you want even bigger slides, you can kill the stability control entirely.
Porsche-Like Performance
Back on pavement, temporarily, the 480-hp, 700-lb-ft Rally put down acceleration and braking numbers as good as or better than the 911 Dakar. With the tires scratching for grip, the Ford blasted to 60 mph in 3.3 seconds and didn’t let up until it hit 120 mph. On the way there, it passed the quarter-mile mark in 11.8 seconds going 115.2 mph. Our test team called it more thrilling than launching a Hummer EV, and those things are nuts. The Porsche? It needs 3.5 seconds to hit 60 mph and 11.9 seconds to run the quarter.
The Rally even stops just as well as the Porsche despite weighing 4,975 pounds, a good 1,320 pounds more than a Dakar—even with all the accessories mounted on the Porsche’s roof. Both cars stopped from 60 mph in 115 feet, as impressive for the Ford’s curb weight as it is for the Porsche’s knobby all-terrain tires.
The weight difference shows up in handling tests, though. The Porsche pulled considerably higher lateral g on our skidpad at 0.93 to the Ford’s 0.83. The 911 was likewise much quicker through our figure-eight test at 24.9 seconds at 0.78 g average compared to the Ford’s 26.1-second lap at 0.74 g average.
The Lamborghini, in case you’re wondering, smoked the Ford and Porsche in everything but braking, where it, too, needed 115 feet to stop.
What we found most interesting, though, was the way the Rally performed when it had grip. Other Mach-E models are very tail-happy when the stability control is off, kinda like the Rally is in the dirt, so we expected even more oversteer. Instead, the Rally is more buttoned-down on pavement, doling out smaller drifts as it tries to grip and go. Ford really programmed this thing to perform, not just get silly.
Engineering Miracle
What’s truly impressive about the Rally is how little Ford had to change to transform the relatively mundane Mach-E into one of the best performance vehicles on the market. It's akin to Chevrolet’s miraculous transformation of the sixth-generation Camaro from the mediocre 2010 model to the supercar-slaying 2014 Z/28. The only mechanical changes to the Rally over a roadgoing Mach-E GT Performance are longer shocks, softer springs, bitchin’ wheels, grille-mounted foglights, a ridiculous wing, and oddball tires. Stir in some fresh traction, stability, and accelerator programming, and boom, rally car.
The rubber is worth talking about for a second, because Ford didn’t go with all-terrain off-road tires like Porsche and Lamborghini. Instead, the Rally wears Michelin CrossClimate2 four-season tires. These are road car tires, true all-seasons (or better put, four-seasons) that are both Mud and Snow rated and 3 Peak Mountain Snowflake rated, which puts them one step below full-on winter tires. Seems like an odd choice for an off-roader, but as demonstrated by the test results and our driving impressions, they’re perfect for this car. Their taller sidewalls not only look the part, but as far as we can tell are solely responsible for the 0.6-inch lift compared to a GT.
Not Perfect
While it’s impressive how little it took to transform the standard Mach-E’s Clark Kent into the Rally’s Superman, the Rally still has its kryptonite. As with the Mach-E GT, it’s possible to push the Rally into overheating the battery and triggering a battery protection mode that seriously limits power. We only experienced it on pavement after some major flogging on a very hot day, but it did happen.
Those unexpected tires also come with an expected drawback. Since they’re not EV-specific tires, they don’t put as much of a priority on range and drag that number down from an EPA-estimated 280 miles in the GT to 265 miles in the Rally. As is the case with gas-powered vehicles, driving it hard will substantially decrease range, which would be easier to swallow if Mach-Es charged faster. Up to 150 kW on a DC Fast charger is OK at best, but it’s quickly falling behind the competition.
While we’re making a wish list, a diet wouldn’t hurt considering a Tesla Model Y is hundreds of pounds lighter. More realistically, we’d love to see an over-the-air (OTA) software update add a torque distribution control that would allow us to adjust the split between the front and rear motors and potentially dial out that understeer based on the road conditions.
The Best Number
At $60,990 to start, the Mach-E is far from cheap, but it’s also only about $2,000 more than a Mach-E GT with the Performance package (which gives that car an equal 700 lb-ft of torque rather than the standard 600). The last few Mach-E GTs we drove were a handling mess, so two grand to go from that to just about the most fun you can have for five figures short of a Miata is the deal of the century. It’s also cheaper than a Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, a benchmark performance EV, with a broader range of capabilities.
Cars like the Mustang Mach-E Rally prove EVs don’t have to be boring. They can have personality and soul, be exciting, thrilling, and engaging. Anyone who says otherwise should spend a few minutes with one of these in the dirt.
Were you one of those kids who taught themselves to identify cars at night by their headlights and taillights? I was. I was also one of those kids with a huge box of Hot Wheels and impressive collection of home-made Lego hot rods. I asked my parents for a Power Wheels Porsche 911 for Christmas for years, though the best I got was a pedal-powered tractor. I drove the wheels off it. I used to tell my friends I’d own a “slug bug” one day. When I was 15, my dad told me he would get me a car on the condition that I had to maintain it. He came back with a rough-around-the-edges 1967 Volkswagen Beetle he’d picked up for something like $600. I drove the wheels off that thing, too, even though it was only slightly faster than the tractor. When I got tired of chasing electrical gremlins (none of which were related to my bitchin’ self-installed stereo, thank you very much), I thought I’d move on to something more sensible. I bought a 1986 Pontiac Fiero GT and got my first speeding ticket in that car during the test drive. Not my first-ever ticket, mind you. That came behind the wheel of a Geo Metro hatchback I delivered pizza in during high school. I never planned to have this job. I was actually an aerospace engineering major in college, but calculus and I had a bad breakup. Considering how much better my English grades were than my calculus grades, I decided to stick to my strengths and write instead. When I made the switch, people kept asking me what I wanted to do with my life. I told them I’d like to write for a car magazine someday, not expecting it to actually happen. I figured I’d be in newspapers, maybe a magazine if I was lucky. Then this happened, which was slightly awkward because I grew up reading Car & Driver, but convenient since I don’t live in Michigan. Now I just try to make it through the day without adding any more names to the list of people who want to kill me and take my job.
Read More
