- Doors and Seats
2 doors, 4 seats
- Engine
5.0i, 8 cyl.
- Engine Power
345kW, 556Nm
- Fuel
Petrol (98) 12.5L/100KM
- Manufacturer
RWD
- Transmission
Manual
- Warranty
5 Yr, Unltd KMs
- Ancap Safety
3/5 star (2017)
2018 Ford Mustang Bullitt: owner review
I made the very sensible decision to sell my Bullitt Mustang recently.
Owner: Mickey P
- It sounds amazing.
- It's a manual.
- It's very hard to say goodbye.
- Slightly higher build quality would make it even better.
NOTE: Editorial images used as none provided by the writer.
I made the very sensible decision to sell my Bullitt Mustang recently. Sensible because I had a new Harley on the way and I really didn't need two toys. Plus, the 'Stang was coming up on three years old, which was about a year longer than I normally keep any car for. And, after all, the Bullitt is just a Ford isn't it? There are many other far more special cars I could move on to in the future.
You have no idea how proud of myself I was for making this brilliant decision. I could tell my wife how smart I was being in minimising my financial exposure to depreciating assets, and that inevitable argument about why on earth I was buying a Harley would be much less, let's say, animated. I would have a bank of brownie points to last many months.
It's very unlike me to be sensible about cars. Or motorbikes. Or most things, if I'm honest. It felt really, really good to be so clever and conservative and, well, sensible, so I diligently rang the local dealers to make arrangements to sell the green machine while my virtue remained intact. All that was left for me to do was to pull the cover off the Bullitt, get it out of the garage, and drive it a very few kilometres to the eagerly waiting dealer who already had buyers lined up. How hard could it be to get a car out of a garage and drive a few kays?
I tried to ignore the fact that the deliberately understated and ever so slightly retro styling of the Bullitt is, to my eyes anyway, about as good as a modern, relatively affordable muscle car can look. And I really did my best not to enjoy the delightful old-school analogue feel of the cue ball shifter as I slotted the manual 'box into gear.
Sadly, ignoring the spectacularly good sound that the Bullitt makes when you prod the start button is a much harder ask, especially with both windows down. I tried to close my ears. I turned the music up. It was only a few kilometres.
It only took a few traffic lights and a few gear changes before I knew my plan to be a sensible person was absolutely doomed. A manual old-school V8 that sounds as good as the Bullitt makes a completely irresistible argument to an old petrol head like me, and a U-turn was made, the garage re-entered, and the cover replaced. No brownie points for me.
So what is the Bullitt Mustang ownership experience like? For me personally, the experience has been perfect. The context to that perfection is that I have lived through the ages of V8 muscle cars, performance turbo fours, and now the rise of battery power. The appeal of a modern muscle car for me is as much about its manual gearbox, the way it looks and sounds, the memories it evokes, and the theatre of driving it, as it is about its performance.
I completely 'get' that others with different experiences and those of different generations may not feel the same about something so old-school. An electric car will undoubtedly be significantly quicker at transporting your body but lousy at motivating your emotions. I can also undertake long-distance road trips in the Mustang without worrying about finding a charger too. If only the borders were open...
From a more pragmatic viewpoint, the car has been absolutely reliable with zero faults over three years and 30,000 very enjoyable kilometres.
The economy achieved is absolutely outstanding with numbers well under 10 litres per hundred kilometres. The MagneRide suspension offers an almost faultless blend of excellent comfort combined with very good handling.
The negatives are that the basic build quality, and particularly the paint quality, are not up to the standards of Asian or European marques, and the fact that a V8 ICE is very quickly becoming very unfashionable.
So it looks like the Bullitt is a keeper. Who knew that breaking up could be so hard to do?
Owner: Mickey P
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