Ford Flexes With 1,400 HP Mustang Mach E

1,400 Horse Power…STOCK…in a 4 door SUV 😃

Ford really did the trick this week with exciting car enthusiasts across the US in the new all electric Ford Mustang Mach E. As someone who loves American Muscle, I along with other enthusiasts were a bit thrown back when the mustang badge was going to be sported by a car that wasn’t a coupe that was a high horsepower beast.

Now keep in mind this was a pure marketing play by Ford’s performance division in seeing what they could extract out of an electric vehicle in terms of power. The version of this car that will actually be sold will only sport 459 Horsepower but still provide the speed to make you feel like you’re riding one of these unique performance models.

Here’s why we are excited

This year has all been about announcing brand new EV’s. All of the major car manufacturers have either released or plan to sell their own take on Electric Vehicles to take a piece of the now rapidly emerging EV market. Electric vehicles as a whole bring great potential to the market as a tool to help decarbonize the grid.

Speaking with utilities and electric retailers has shown us that beyond any new energy demand adding appliance – EVs are their biggest concerns. The heavy demand characteristics of these cars is a major concern to utilities across the nation.

Incentives Are Driving EV Adoption & Utilities Are Getting Nervous

Let’s take Germany for instance which in some cases has been uber aggressive in getting EVs on the road beyond taking a strong renewable posture. In some cases making EVs entirely free! Now this brings up a huge energy management problem. With most EVs coming with fast charging capabilities, allowing cars to recharge say 50 kWh in an hour for arguments sake…and then you add tens of thousands or even millions of these to the road…

How can a utility keep up with that demand while also introducing renewables into the grid?

Tesla and US based utilities are attempting to solve this through using EVs as energy storage for the grid and of course buffing Time of Use rates to incentivize charging at different times of the day or even later in the week.

Europe is already learning this mistake during Covid-19 and it didn’t even require everyone to own an EV. Grid flexibility is CRITICAL towards building a clean grid and to enable grid flexibility – infrastructure has to be rebuilt driving costs even higher for utilities….

However, until this core problem is addressed – people buying EVs might see large cost increases in the next few years to recharge as adoption starts to skyrocket without incentives…Fortunately we all have high horsepower cars on the horizon to make it fun while contemplating this question.