The Ford Mustang Mach-E isn’t a Mustang in the traditional sense, but ultimately, who cares? It’s a great electric crossover, and it’s not like Ford stopped selling the regular Mustang. Plus, while I’m sure Ford CEO Jim Farley has his flaws, he isn’t actively trying to destroy the federal government and has never once exposed me to his breeding fetish, so that’s another two points in Mach-E’s favor. Still, some people really want to hear that V8 roar, and the Mach-E doesn’t have an engine of any kind. Don’t worry, though, Hertz fixed that. Sort of.
The 2023 Ford Mustang Mach-E you’re looking at here is Shelby GT-H, and yes, that H stands for Hertz. This isn’t just any former rental car, though. It’s one of 100 that Hertz commissioned Shelby to build, at an alleged cost of $21,841 per car. It won’t be any quicker than a regular Mach-E GT, but you do get 20-inch black wheels, a carbon fiber hood, the customary gold stripes, a carbon fiber front lip, GT-H seats and, most importantly for our purposes here, a Borla sound system that makes it sound like your EV actually has the GT 500’s V8 under the hood.
Fake it ’til you make it
Adding a fake exhaust to an EV certainly sounds like a terrible idea at first. After all, how much overlap can there really be between people who want an EV and people who want their car to sound like a GT500? There must be dozens of possible buyers out there. And yet, I have to admit the video of the seller “revving” the “engine” sounds better than I thought it would. I don’t get the appeal personally, but it’s probably a neat trick for kids at car shows, and I’m not going to pretend the black and gold spec doesn’t do it for me because it absolutely does.
It also isn’t like you have to leave the “exhaust” on all the time, which means you could drive it like a cooler-looking Mach-E GT 99% of the time and then show off the fake noises it makes at Cars & Coffee or any time you give a ride to a child. Alternatively, if you have a neighbor who’s constantly annoying you with how loud their vehicles are, you could give them a taste of their own medicine without the need to buy a car that needs gas and is actually that loud.
Okay, so that pitch isn’t going to appeal to the vast majority of people reading this, and the premium you’ll pay versus buying a regular Mach-E GT with similar miles makes it something you have to really be into to justify. But if we only wrote up cars with near-universal appeal, Jalopnik would be nothing but Honda CR-Vs and Kia Tellurides, and no one wants that. Besides, the 1-of-100 thing has to be worth a little something, right? I guess we’ll find out in five days when the auction is finally over.
