Door handles? You don’t need no stinkin’ door handles.
Ford has ditched ’em in favor of buttons. One reason
why is that children find handles difficult.D
eep underground at Ford’s Product
Development Center, a large
studio has been converted into
an “immersion room,” its tempo-
rary walls papered with endless
PowerPoint slides. Normally, vision
boards like this are a clear indication that
both imagination and inspiration were
snuffed out of the project three months in.
But then something caught my eye—a
slide titled “Winning Will Not Be Driven
by Compliance.”
Below the headline were four cars: a
BMW i3, Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt EV,
and an electric Ford Focus. Although I
strongly dislike the poor-driving i3, have
forgotten about driving the Leaf as many
times as I’ve driven it, and imagine that a
small battery shoved into a Focus would
be ho-hum, I genuinely like the Bolt. We
voted it our 2017 Car of the Year. So why
was it on this slide? Then it hit me: As
good as the Bolt might be, Chevy’s electrichatchback looks just as dorky as the other
three compliance vehicles.
Back in 2014, Ford saw the writing on
the wall; the decision was made to go elec-
tric. We were shown a quarter-scale clay
model of an equally dorked-out, front-
wheel-drive CUV that was set to go into
production right around now. Luckily for
car enthusiasts, smarter and cooler heads
intervened.
Instead of delivering an electric car that
Ford didn’t want to build to dealers who
didn’t want to sell it to customers whoTHE MACH-E DOESN’T DEVELOP
POWER IN A WAY ANY MUSTANG HAS
—AND THAT’S NOT A BAD THING.Fully electric. The Mach-E doesn’t
use any gasoline, and it never will.
Also, Amazon will come to your
house and install a charger.didn’t want to buy it, in a decision that
went all the way up to Bill Ford, the Blue
Oval decided to put a pony on its first
proper, mass-market electric vehicle.
Meet the newest member of the
Mustang family, the Ford Mustang
Mach-E.
A Mustang-badged electric vehicle?
And an SUV, at that? Really? Yeah, for
real. Ford leveraged the brand’s great
strengths—namely, the fact that almost
every person on earth likes the Mustang.
Not only that (and I found this next part
particularly gratifying to learn), but
performance car customers are also
much better educated about battery
electric vehicles (BEVs) than the average
car buyer.
One of the hurdles to BEV adoption is
the persistent myths about cars powered
by batteries. A few Ford shared with
us: 92 percent of new car buyers think
electric cars are toylike; 75 percentFEBRUARY 2020 MOTORTREND.COM 312021 Ford Mustang Mach-E I FIRST LOOK