The Ford Mustang has traditionally been an all-American brand, with several decades of successful performance on the US market. And now, after all this time, the company has finally decided to let the Mustang explore the world, as they’re preparing to deploy the vehicle to overseas markets, starting with China. Ford Motor have already started exporting Mustangs to China, and they’re planning to quickly expand their reach even further, spreading across 120 markets around the world.
Ford have adapted their strategy to current market situations very successfully, as the company has been focusing more closely on producing vehicles that can be easily sold all over the world, reaching all kinds of markets and not just limiting themselves to the US one as they have before with this model. Of course, it’s not an easy task, especially when the company wants to quickly expand to multiple different markets all over the world. It’s a complicated procedure, and each model that’s going to be sold overseas usually has to receive various small adjustments in order to make it suitable for a specific market.
This includes major design changes such as putting the steering wheel on the right instead of the left, adjusting the dashboard, as well as translating all relevant information for the car’s operation to different languages. In addition, taxes can quickly become an issue for a company that’s not too careful with what exactly they’re selling – for example, China can be very unwelcoming towards vehicles with four-liter engines and above, practically doubling a car’s price after tax is added.
For Ford, this means that the company would have to introduce some design changes to the Mustang’s Chinese variant if they want to stay relevant on that market. With the car’s default five-liter engine, it would cost around $130,000 on the Chinese market, compared to its $32,300 price for US buyers.
With that in mind, Ford set out to develop a new, smaller engine running on four cylinders which would make the car more suitable for markets like the Chinese one, even if buyers would have to get a slightly toned down version of the famous Mustang.
And yet, the model with the smaller engine apparently doesn’t degrade the driving experience, despite having a smaller power output than its counterpart. Ford have been very careful in their engineering to ensure that Chinese buyers will not feel like they’re being left out of the fun when investing in a Mustang GT, so they might have a very good chance of making a successful release on this market. After that, the company could easily release even more cars to solidify their presence once they have some established popularity.