This 2024 Ford Mustang Dark Horse 6-Speed Has Barely Ever Been Driven

By Disneyfied, I mean how Disney takes valuable IPs like Indiana Jones and Snow White, only to ruin them by making it more about the political message rather than paying homage to the original story and characters. It’s insulting to anyone who’s a fan of those original stories. Oh, was that a bit too political? My bad.

Anyway, before I got sidetracked, I was rambling about how the Mustang now looks way too far removed from the styling of the original, and to a certain extent, that’s a bad thing. Look at how much success Dodge has had with the Challenger, replicating the exact design of the original model. They literally took that first-gen Challenger, made it more massive, polished the sheet metal and voilà, retro-modern Nirvana.

So, I quite hate the look of the S650 Mustang, right? Wrong. The more I stared, the more I realized that there is something inherently retro about its appearance. The only thing was that Ford designers simply didn’t go back far enough in time with it. So, instead of looking like a modern-day version of a 1969 Mach 1, the current 2024 Mustang Dark Horse flagship variant looks more like something Robocop would drive on his day off.

In other words, it’s very “80s totalitarianism movie”-like, and I quite like that. It’s bold, yet subtle and with a certain coldness to it – very little emotion, but not in a bad way (like say a Mercedes EQE or the BMW iX).

Now, in case you want one that’s been driven to and from the mall a few times, we just found this Dark Matter Gray Metallic example getting auctioned off to the highest bidder. Oh, and just to clarify, the Dark Horse is the first new Mustang moniker introduced since the Bullitt was released in 2001, and it serves as a direct successor to the Mach 1.

This car packs loads of visual highlights, among them the front splitter, side skirts, horse badges (forward facing), quad exhausts, gloss black vinyl hood stripe, Dark Horse puddle lamps, LED taillights with sequential turn signals, and a large rear wing courtesy of the Handling Package. As for the Dark Tarnished-painted wheels, they measure 19-inches in diameter and are wrapped in 305/30 Pirelli P-Zero Trofeo RS tires at the front, and 315/30 rubber at the rear.

Moving on to the interior, we’ve got black leather Recaro front seats with microsuede inserts and blue accent stitching, 4G Wi-Fi hotspot, a wireless charging pad, dual-zone automatic climate control, a 12-speaker Bang & Olufsen sound system, and a nice, thick flat-bottom steering wheel that feels just wonderful to grip.

There’s also a dashboard plaque on the passenger side that identifies this Mustang Dark Horse as chassis #R0948, for whatever that’s worth.

As for performance, there’s a 5.0-liter Coyote V8 under the hood, factory-rated at 500 horsepower and 418 lb-ft of torque, with everything going to the rear wheels via a six-speed manual transmission.

When new, this car cost exactly $71,505 (options included), and it now has 389 miles on the clock. So, it’s still pretty much brand-new.