CarCast+Edmunds - Mustang eBike, Ford Racing in 2026, new Mustang Dark Horse SC and more.

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Welcome to the Edmunds' CarCast Podcast, I'm Matt, the Motorator, D'Andrea, here with

Alistair Weaver.

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Heading into the weekend, it's warm and sunny in Southern California.

It's actually warm in here.

It's got to be 70-something in my place.

It's crazy.

I had one of my little highlights the week.

I didn't like my one-to-ones with my key reports, and I go down the...

I like to do it.

I go for a walk on the beach, put the headphones in, and then I can think properly.

I don't think well if I'm just staring at a screen, so I go for a little walk.

And it was crazy.

It was like 70-something degrees.

People were out there in their board shorts and bikinis.

This is insane.

It's the middle of January.

But yeah, we were out.

The e-bikes went for a bike ride.

The e-bike is perfect, by the way, because you go out and you go, we're going to get some exercise.

So we're going to start riding our bikes.

We're going to start heading through Santa Monica, up the beach, Venice Beach, up toward Malibu.

You get about 15, 16 miles into it.

Your legs are a little sore.

You got a little sweaty.

You're like, it's good.

And then on the way home, you stop someplace in Santa Monica for a beer and a burger.

And then you use the electric motor those last three miles because you don't want to,

once you're buzzed and full, you're like, thank goodness this thing can ride by itself.

I have one that I take the kids to school on, a Murph one, which is this

California surf-inspired brand, which is great.

I'm not paid to say that.

I'm just reflecting on that product.

And then, but I've actually bought another, they were selling off some old ones that look

like BMXs.

And I'm actually got picking up one next week that's just for me, that isn't,

it isn't so big and heavy that I've got the kids on the back.

But I'm with you.

But the only thing about them is it's a bit like cars.

The one that we have for the kids is limited at 20 miles an hour.

And the one I'm getting for me, I think we'll go to 28, class three, as they call it.

It's 28, yeah.

So you just get into this car mindset of like, oh, quite fancy something.

It's a bit faster.

It's the same mentality.

It's a piece of kit.

It's technology.

It's gear.

I want to go faster.

I want to tune this.

And it's a dangerous game to get into.

Because also, at some point, you're going to fall off.

Right.

So the bike that I have, and this maybe this is common with a lot of them,

is when you're pedaling, you can turn the electric motor on and it can use your pedal

power combined with the electric motor.

If you're not pedaling, there's a throttle.

You can just ride it like a little motorcycle.

I found if you are in a high gear and you're pedaling,

you can pedal with the motor faster than 28 miles an hour.

So it doesn't limit that.

Now, I have an e-bike and this is going to be a shock to you.

And I tell you that the e-bike that I have is the Ford e-bike.

You've got a Ford Bronco e-bike, really?

I've literally got the Ford Mustang e-bike.

That's funny.

I've got the Ford Mustang e-bike.

Because I always wonder who buys these.

You're going to Porsche Center and they've got Porsche branded surfboards

and Golf Club and I was like, who actually buys these?

That's a $3,500 bike.

Yeah, it was like four and a half when they came out with it.

Now, to be fair, this is no secret why I'm bringing this up.

So a year ago at SEMA, I brought my Ford electric truck, my lightning,

and we did a deal with Ford and the e-bike manufacturer

to have the e-bike in the back of the truck.

We had the very first one.

We had the prototype from last year.

It was in Vegas with a photographer and he brought it to me Monday night,

the day before SEMA, and it was just covered in dirt.

And I was like, what is this?

He's like, here's the e-bike I was told to deliver to you.

It's seven o'clock at night Monday.

So I bring it into the real truck booth and they have a crew there.

I think there's like three guys standing around.

They're like, we got it.

Don't worry, we'll clean it for you.

They're all just kind of wiping it down, doing it by hand.

We put it in the back of the truck and display it.

And it was a deal with Ford and real truck and this e-bike company

that makes it on behalf of Ford for the license.

And then for them, I said, great, let's do this,

but I want an e-bike out of the deal.

And it took a year for me to get delivery.

I got it in December.

I want to have a play with it.

Yeah, 70 to 750 watts.

That's what my new one's going to have.

And mine looks more like a BMX, but they stopped making them.

So they were doing a deal to get rid of the remaining stock,

which is why I grabbed one.

But yeah, similar, like 750 watts, 28 miles an hour,

because that's all legislation, isn't it?

60 miles, is that cool?

60 miles of range is like, if you're on the motor all the time,

you just ride it like a motorcycle.

We've done 20 mile rides on this thing.

And I used 7% of the battery.

The amount of range you can get if you're actually able to pedal a bit is cool.

I'll tell you, it's a heavy bike.

It's like 70 pounds.

So yeah.

And the frame is very chunky.

There's a lot of excessive, but it's fantastic.

The brakes are fantastic.

It's super smooth.

It has, I don't know if they have pictures of it,

but it has this whole digital gauge package on the top.

I don't know why they don't have it in the photos.

That's kind of weird.

It has the start, stop button like you'd have in your Mustang.

And the dash comes up with the Ford logo,

and it's got like a speedometer out of the car.

But it runs great.

It's smooth.

It's got really good parts on it.

The suspension and everything is really nice.

So yeah, I just been roll around on it.

I was cynical when we got one with the kids,

but now I take the kids to school on it every day.

So I ride six miles there, six miles back.

And they're great.

And I think it just plays to the same kind of mentality

why we love cars because it's cool, it's tech, it's different.

And they're quite speedy.

And the big thing for me is you get home

and you don't need a shower.

Whereas if I take my normal bike,

I come home and I'm going to need a shower

because I'll be sweating up the hills and stuff.

If you turn the motor off, then you're pedaling a 70-pound bike.

So that's the workout.

So if you want the workout, it's fine.

But if you don't want the workout,

like if you've got to run around town, like here,

there's so much traffic, especially four or five in the afternoon,

like you'll just sit in a line of cars trying to get out of here.

I can get on an e-bike and get to the grocery store

or get to the shopping complex or the bank or whatever

in half the time.

You know, it's really kind of interesting.

It's fun.

Everything is just like that thing.

It's good.

You know, you see all the kids come flying past my house on them

and so you've got them chipped and chewing and all the rest of it.

And they've got like a boyfriend or girlfriend

dangling off the back of it 30 miles an hour.

And I'm like, that's not my kids.

No, that's a little crazy.

And one last thing is like,

so we were driving along the boardwalk on the beach

and a front of mine had a house up in the Palisades,

which for those of you unfamiliar, obviously,

it was a big fire, but it's very high up on a cliff, right?

It's in, to drive up there, it's a very big hill.

And I was driving by and I knew that he was a big car collector too.

And he was, unfortunately, he was out of town when the fires happened.

So not only did he lose his house, he lost his cars.

And he did have like a 75 9-11.

And he said that was crazy because, you know,

it was probably a car he bought like for $5,000, $7,000 kept it forever.

And he had an underground garage with like a turntable in it.

So you can go in and return and put it in the spot.

And so interesting, he said, between the cars,

he's like, he had a McLaren and he had a 9-11.

He had a few others.

He said the McLaren, because it's so modern, it's all carbon fiber.

He goes, that just looked like a little pile of dust,

you know, like something out of a cartoon.

If somebody got zapped and they're just like a little,

like an anthill style of dust, it was like, it looked like that.

He goes, the 9-11 was crazy because the car was basically gone,

but it was like the outline of a Porsche 9-11, you know, in ash and soot.

I mean, at least he was okay.

But yeah, he was okay.

He lost one of those.

He said like shots of Malibu of cars where you see the silhouette and yeah.

So we wanted to go up there and see the house.

And that's where the e-motor came in.

Going up the hill, it's fantastic.

Going down the hill, you're doing 35 miles an hour

and it feels like you're doing 70.

You know, it's fast.

It's a lot of inertia in a 70 pound bike at that speed.

Yeah.

And you're like, this thing's got a front and rear disc brakes.

Now I see why.

Okay.

So as we are recording this, it was big news from Ford Racing.

Obviously we're doing it.

That's a good segue.

Yeah.

We done Mustang to Mustang.

Mustang to Mustang.

Ford Performance, which has been around for a while.

There was like Ford Racing was just the racing side.

Ford Performance was the aftermarket parts that Ford Performance catalog

and Ford Performance had some influence over the production vehicles

of their high performance cars, right?

Like Shelby and Raptor.

Now it falls under one umbrella, right?

We talked to the guy, Carl Wynman.

We talked to him a little while ago.

That was an engineer on the Ford Racing team.

He was in charge of taking production cars and making them Ford,

like the Raptor program, which is 15 years old or so.

So between what Ford Racing is trying to do now under one umbrella

and what Jim Farley has said in the past about getting it more into racing,

continuing with that, there was a lot of like EV pressure

and people were pulling out of that kind of stuff.

But he's getting into it.

And as you pointed out, maybe it was a couple of weeks ago,

Genesis too, like when we came back from LA Auto Show,

Genesis wants a racing program.

They're going to start doing, I don't know, sports car racing, Lamar racing.

I think they're working on like a prototype.

Yeah, the World Endurance Championship.

Yeah.

And it's Jim Farley, because he's a big racer himself.

Formula One now, there was a big thing with the working on the engines with Red Bull.

Although that was kind of weird that they,

I know what we're going to talk about in a minute,

but there was something kind of interesting coming out.

Everybody's massively downplaying like the engine,

because Red Bull is now making its own engines.

Because when the history of this was like Honda split with Red Bull,

when Honda pulled out Formula One,

and then in true Honda fashion, I know,

because I used to work for them in Formula One,

said, oh, hang on a minute, this is a bad idea pulling out.

So they're now there with Aston Martin and Red Bulls building its own engines.

But Red Bulls building its own engines in consultation with Ford,

which has now got Ford badging on the engines.

So it's like, and now everybody's going, yeah,

we're not going to be very good this year.

So they're either doing that as a complete,

like stamp and expectations and over deliver.

Yeah.

Or they've got problems.

And it's like, we're in a big mess,

and we better come out and say so now, so nobody's disappointed.

And by the way, isn't Red Bull also doing a supercar?

They're doing like a high performance street car.

I don't know if it's like a $3 million car or whatever.

Well, they were doing the stuff.

Yeah, they were doing the stuff with Aston.

Well, I mean, they were doing the stuff with that.

Well, Adrian knew he was doing the stuff with Aston.

But then, of course, he went to, you know, that he was,

that was even before he moved to Aston.

I mean, it's all kind of pretty incestuous.

So yeah, he's interesting.

But the big news, I suppose, from our point of view,

is the must, what's he called?

Well, so the dark horse on the street side,

but on the racing side, just a couple of quick notes.

Bob Tasker, the third, he's stepping out to,

out of his funny car, he's getting new drivers.

He's going to retain, he's going to be a team owner.

He's going to run it now.

So he's retiring from driving.

Austin Prok, he's a two-time NHRA champion.

He's going to be running a dark horse funny car

because we're talking about Mustang dark horse.

What does that brand mean to them?

What does that nameplate mean to them?

We'll get into that a little bit more.

He's going to be doing a dark horse funny car.

I believe the dark horse SC is going

to be the NASCAR themed car as well.

I'd like to say that's what the car is.

But obviously, it's just a lot of stickers than anything else.

You're right.

Red Bull and Ford doing powertrain partnerships.

The off-road stuff, right?

They're all in on Baja.

They're going to King of the Hammers.

They're doing Dakar right now.

That I don't know if you were, I know you were part of that,

but so it's happening right now.

The second in Dakar as we speak, we've one stage to go.

Backstream is second.

Carlos Sainz Sr. is fourth, I believe.

When they did the announcement on Thursday night,

they were in second, fourth, and fifth place

with three vehicles in the first stage.

There's three stages, right?

In three stages to go, yeah.

I mean, as we recall, this is one stage to go,

and they're either going to finish.

They're likely to finish, because the last stage is always

a big thing.

But so they're probably either going to be second and fourth

or third and fourth, probably.

Well, they really want to be first.

Yeah, we're not going to be first,

because that she's going to win.

So you heard it here first.

Okay, but this is what's interesting is they also announced

going back to Le Mans.

And Jim Farley very specifically has said this.

I think it was part of his announcement,

or maybe it was Bill Ford.

He said, we want to win Le Mans.

And the way to win Le Mans is you've got to have the prototype car.

If you want to win overall, not just a class win,

they've did their class wins in the Ford GT, right?

So they are developing their car in-house

with a chassis developer, of course.

But they said they're developing the car in-house.

They're developing the engine in-house,

which is interesting because you were talking about the Red Bull

Ford partnership and Ford doing engines.

Now it's starting to make sense going, oh, there's a team now

that they've built out of engineers going,

we're going to build, it's probably one team, right?

Going, we're going to build F1 engines.

We're going to build the off-road truck that's racing the car.

Like the engines and stuff are going to come out

of one like internal engine division,

obviously with some outside resources and suppliers.

But the other thing is, is they really pushed the Coyote V8.

They're saying the Coyote V8 is our platform.

We're racing that everywhere we can.

So when we race Le Mans, expect a V8.

It will likely be a 5.8 liter.

It's not the 5.2 and not the 5.0.

Naturally aspirated 5.8 liter with hybrid technology

is probably what they're going to be.

Now, can they develop a car and an engine from scratch

and win Le Mans first time out?

I don't know.

I think the problem with all of the, again,

going back to days when I worked in Formula One with Honda

and then they pulled out and it became brawn

and all the rest of it.

But they struggled with the whole,

we're going to put basically corporate people

into the Formula One team.

So they ended up with somebody from MotoGP

from the bike racing coming into the aerodynamics.

There was just a lot of decisions

which were taken by a big corporate company.

And all the Formula One teams and racing teams

that have been successful have stood back from that

and basically said, you're going to run a race team

and we will be hands off as possible.

If you looked at what happened with Ross Brawn

or even if I've read his book, it was very interesting

that you end up with the CEO of the Formula One team

earning an awful lot more than the CEO of the company.

And certainly that's true of the drivers, clearly.

So it ends up with a strange dynamic within the business

but as soon as the marketing people get hold of it

and say, you've got to have a V8

because that's what we're selling a Mustang

and it's like, we have all the rivals have got V6s

or they've got this or they've got that.

That's always the problem with big corporations

trying to do it in-house.

And Honda had a lot of those problems,

Toyota had a lot of those problems in Formula One.

How do you, you've got to just bring this different mentality

to racing, which is also why the Formula One

is basically run out of the UK

and a pretty small geographical area in the UK

because that's where all the expertise is

and it's far enough from the motherships

not to be interfered with.

Mercedes Formula One is nowhere near Stuttgart.

So okay, so you're bringing up a good point.

Do you think Ford has a chance?

Do you think Genesis has a chance?

Not in Formula One, but at Le Mans.

If they're doing a hypercar at Le Mans,

if that's the category, is that the category?

In a hypercar.

Yeah, hypercar.

Yeah, they keep changing.

Yeah, it's World Endurance Championship

that then morphs into Le Mans.

They've all got a chance depending on how they run it.

I mean, obviously the last Ford program

was run by Multimatics,

which was a kind of like an offshoot

and then they also built the GT road cars.

They've got money.

I mean, Genesis is going to spend an awful lot of money

Audi have shown how, you know,

that they were successful for many years

then they rebashed it as a Bentley one.

So it's, you know, there's a proven track record,

Porsche obviously,

but they've just got to the way to do it

is basically say, this is a race team.

I mean, it's almost like stages.

You have your big corporation that does your mainstream models.

Then you have your sort of performance division,

which has a bit more license to break some of the rules.

Then you have the race team,

which is like the Navy Seals.

And it's like, go do what the hell you like, basically.

Yeah, yeah.

Wait, when Ford said,

hey, we're developing this hypercar from scratch,

engines from scratch,

I don't know if they mean, you know,

that's in the little room in Detroit

where they developed the Ford GT.

This could be in North Carolina someplace.

This could be in the UK.

This could be anywhere in the world.

It could be at Red Bull in the UK.

It could be at Red Bull, right?

They just, by the way,

when they say they're developing it at house,

they could just be like paying the salaries of the guys

at Red Bull and call them, put Ford shirts on the go.

They've got a lot of houses.

Yeah, right?

So however they're getting it done,

I don't know, it'll be interesting to see.

One other thing that Jim Farley had pointed out,

and this is an interesting thing

because of the massive financial hit they took on EVs,

as did a lot of companies.

He pointed out that this past year

was their best year as far as sales,

volume of sales in the last 10 years.

So they've sold cars.

They just didn't make any money.

Well, they sold cars, but also like everybody else,

they sold cars on the basis that the tax credit was finishing.

And there was massive lease deals available.

I mean, seriously, we have a great page on Edmunds.

I kind of check it out for curiosity,

even if you're not shopping for a car.

But if you Google Edmunds hidden gems,

we have a page which basically shows all the lease deals in your area.

And he's fascinating because he's someone like,

oh, it's a coma.

There's like a couple of hundred bucks or something.

There's a lot.

You just realize who's trying to shift metal.

And the thing about the car,

he said, oh, yeah, we sell more EVs than ever.

Yeah, because when I looked at getting a Mackie,

you wanted 900 bucks a month,

and then you were selling them at 250.

So, you know, it's not surprising you sell more

if you're going to let you lease them at 250 bucks a month.

Yeah.

So I don't know.

The big question with EVs is what's happening right now.

Yeah.

You know, when the market is depressed,

and it's how it responds from here.

We'll see.

We're going to have to do EVs at another time,

but to finish up on the fact that-

We've got to talk about the V8 Mustang.

So, yeah, so also the sort of the moral of the story,

or basically the 45-minute presentation from Ford

is they brought us a new high-performance Mustang,

something to replace the GT500.

We have the Dark Horse.

Now we have the Dark Horse SC.

It's the Dark Horse with a supercharger on it.

It's essentially the 5.2-liter V8,

seven-speed dual-clutch transmission.

It's an evolution of the GT500.

And we can get into some of the specifics on the car,

which- and then we can get into the name of the car.

But specifically on this car, it looks fantastic.

You know, the performance is going to be there

to be able to take the GT500 as a jumping point,

the new 650 platform.

S650 platform is a jumping point.

They've revised the MagnaRide.

They've taken bits from GTD.

You can get the optional carbon ceramic brakes

right off of the GTD.

As you imagine, just a lot of the calibration

and performance options are there.

And in the track pack version, which is interesting,

is I believe the wheels and tires, you get it squared up.

You can get front and rear all the same.

So if you're going to hit the track, that's super interesting.

Yeah, we can get into the name of the minute,

because that is the big elephant in the room.

I mean, look, the current Mustang is a heavy facelift

of the last generation Mustang.

And so it stands to reason that the, whatever it's called,

is the sort of, you know, a fairly sensible evolution

of the old GT500, which Edmunds owned,

and we absolutely adored.

They've been a bit kind of, they're not giving us power,

but you know, the last one had, what, 760.

You can get a supercharged Mustang

that Edmunds owns, of course, with over 800.

So I think it's got to have over 800,

because otherwise, you know, why sell a supercharger package

for a standard car that has over 800?

I agree.

I think if you can go to the Ford racing catalog

and get the supercharger kit that they claim is 810 horsepower,

I don't see how this can't be less than 810 horsepower.

No, the big difference this has compared to what we've done,

which is buy a dark horse and add the supercharger,

is you have got that DCT gearbox,

which is basically the double clutch transmission.

The weakness in the current car is just that automatic transmission

is just not as, not really set up for a car

with this kind of performance.

The only weird thing they've done,

they've done something that irritates me

that what Porsche does all the time is,

if you buy the track package, they delete the rear seats,

because, you know, it costs race.

But like, what about me?

I've got kids, you know, actually, the nice thing

about a Mustang is you can stuff kids in the back.

So I don't know whether that's going to be an option

that you can then opt to have them back in,

but it just seems, they do these weird decisions.

It's like, oh, okay.

So if you've got kids, you can't have the track.

Yeah. So there's a few things that they didn't say,

like, as part of the announcement,

they said it was going to be squared up,

so presumably meaning they're going to fit 305 or 315 tires all around.

But they didn't confirm the price.

They didn't confirm the horsepower and torque levels.

They weren't really sure exactly on some of those things.

So maybe you get it, maybe you don't get it.

It's probably going to be more like a 3L-5 front and a 315 rear.

You get the R compound tires with the track pack.

You get carbon fiber wheels.

And the carbon fiber wheels, as you pointed out,

I think the track pack with carbon fiber wheels

and rear seat delete.

The MagnaRide is tuned specifically for that,

given the lighter weight, both on the suspension and in the car.

So it is specific.

If you buy the non-track pack car

and put the carbon fiber wheels on,

I'm sure there's a benefit,

but the MagnaRide for the track pack car

will be tuned for that as well.

Yeah.

It is.

I mean, the big elephant in the room is the net.

I mean, look, the price of this,

we bought our old Shelby GT5 and I think we paid about 80 grand

for it back in 2020-ish.

You know, this is going to be,

it probably starts at under 100 without the track pack.

With the track pack, those carbon wheels were fortune.

It's going to be, and the carbon stoppers, isn't it?

So it's going to be over 100 grand for the track pack version.

Comfortably over 100 grand, which is a huge amount of money

for a Mustang.

And then you get into the name.

And these things shouldn't matter,

but I would think they do.

That, you know, if you have a GT500 or a Shelby,

you know, you have a Shelby, you have a GT500.

And you walk around and you tell your mates

and you get up in the morning and you look at your Shelby.

You know, this is what the Dark Horse,

so they've got the Dark Horse, which is what, 70 grand-ish.

And then the Dark Horse SC, which is presumably just supercharged.

I know that they've got to buy and license the Shelby name

and all the rest of it, the good stuff that.

But it just feels to me like, you know, it's like Porsche

dropping, not calling a GT3 a GT3.

I just, it doesn't work for me.

I'm sorry, I just think 100 grand.

I agree with you.

So I've been kind of sitting on this for a while.

I mean, never 100% sure, but I was,

I knew that Ford wasn't going into license the Shelby name again.

And then about a year ago when Shelby came out with their GT350,

that pretty much locked it in and told everybody,

told the world going, you know,

that's why they would do like Super Snake or whatever.

Right? Because that was, you know, they can sell the Shelby car,

but if they wanted to sell a Shelby GT350 or a GT500,

Ford licensed that from the Shelby group.

And when Shelby American came out with the GT350,

I'm like, oh, Ford's not doing one because we're not going to have two of the same thing.

So yeah, when you start thinking about it,

you know, a Ford strategy is going probably twofold.

This one, they're going, we could save a little bit of money,

right? By not having that license.

And two, we could start to build a new brand or a name plate for a younger audience that maybe

the Shelby name is aging out of.

But I don't know that the Shelby name needs to age out.

Like the company does a good job of keeping it relevant, you know,

the Shelby American, I think sells, I don't know, two or three times as many Shelby trucks

as they do Shelby Mustangs, you know, those big, you know, Shelby trucks are all over the place.

And who's buying those? I don't think it's all, you know, I think, you know, well off

younger people, I think are buying those as well.

And even younger people, you know, you had the Ford versus Ferrari film and everything else,

younger people buy into their heritage.

And really, it is slightly contradictory because what Ford has said,

and other, you know, big European and American brands have said what we've got compared to,

say, the Chinese startups is heritage and history.

And for Ford, you know, the racing history of Shelby and all the rest of it is critical to that.

And that lineage of, you know, of the car, you know, the racing and then the road cars and

everything else, it all comes together. And to start a sort of sub brand from scratch is really

hard. And I just don't see, because in this, what are you going to call it? I've got a dark horse.

Oh, yeah, that's like, yeah, that's like the dark. No, no, I've got a dark horse like SC.

Yeah, no, any supercharged version of dark horse like we have at Edmunds. No, that's

a suit. It's like, I don't get it GT 500 is such an iconic name. And I think we've seen with

different Mustangs, they've done so many like Bullets and Mac ones, and it means something

if you're an absolute diehard. But for most people, it's a bit meaningless.

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think I would have liked to have seen it been called a Shelby. I just think

it's potentially better resale value down the line, like in 20 years from now, when, you know,

the dark horse SC rolls across Barrick Jackson, is it going to be the same as if, you know, like,

I think the last gen, the GT 500 that you guys had, I think if a Shelby GT 500 track pack rolls

across, you know, the auction block, and then then the next car is the SC, I think the Shelby is

going to do better. I think so. And actually, I wish, you know, I wish it had the money to buy

by ours because, you know, there's a car also with a bit of heritage because of all the content

we've done around it. Yeah, I, and this car isn't enough of a leap forwards over that car either.

You know, it's probably going to have another 50 horsepower, which frankly,

given that it's rear wheel drive is a bit hit neither here nor there. You know, the gearbox

is similar that it's not going to be, it's probably going to be refined and iterated and better.

It's not, but it's not going to be like a quantum leap where suddenly you're going x percent faster.

Yeah, honestly, the differences between that version and this version is the S650 platform,

the interior. You're getting the bigger screen if you want the bigger screen.

But for a lot of people that didn't want that, they wanted the more conventional look to it.

So those of you who just want the center stack that's conventional and the gauge package in front

of you, then the GT 500 is going to be the one. If I'm sitting on an old GT 500, I'm smashing the

champagne today because this is great news. Yeah. Now, that being said, I really want to drive a

dark horse SC. It's looks phenomenal. It's going to be a great car. I just don't understand the

logic behind that. I mean, okay, maybe Shelby just wanted crazy money and Ford just said,

I'm sorry, but you know, we're not playing ball if that's the kind of sums we're talking about.

And that happens. But the money to establish a brand, like a sub brand, the money that you

have to spend just to build the awareness is so big as well. Yeah. I don't know. But I, you know,

imagine, you know, going into your auctions, bring a trailer or whatever it may be about Jackson,

you're going to go in and say, I've got the last GT 500. Yeah. Yeah. And that's going to play for

years. That's going to play for years. That's going to be a big selling point for years and years.

Yeah. All right. Let's take a quick break and then we'll get into some more news. We'll be right back.

Football fans Monday night's game isn't the NFL this week, but it is still a big one. The

college football playoff national championship on fan duel right now. Indiana is around a seven

and a half point favorite over Miami. That means Indiana's got the edge, but Miami's explosive

offense could flip the game anytime. So check out the fan duel app and get your bet in.

So one thing I wanted to bring up real quick was just have to mention it.

The latest you drags video battle of the wagons. Got a lot of attention for it. A lot of people

discussing it on, you know, it's popped up in various forums and other website, which is always

fun to see. And it's a classic example of what we've been talking about for like months on the show

is, you know, just raw speed isn't necessarily, you know, yes, it might win in this half giving

away what what happens. But you know, the M five is such a sledgehammer of a car that yeah, it's

really fast, but both Jonathan and I got to the end of it and we're like, yeah, it might be faster,

but we both have the RS six. The M five is just doesn't really feel like a traditional M car to

me. It doesn't have a lot of finesse. It's just a massive, heavy, heavy sledgehammer. And the RS

six, which we used to think is a really heavy, big, heavy car now feels kind of lighter than agile

by comparison. I love the RS six is one of my favorite cars. The RS six is great, but the power on

the M five. So we can look at the specs and then you guys can watch the video. The they're both

well, they're both V eights, but M five is 4.4 liter Audi's four liter. They're both all wheel drive.

And they're both turbocharged. And the M five is hybrid. Yeah, it's the hybrid that really,

really, really delivers a plug in hybrid 717. Yes, 717 horsepower in the M five compared to 621

almost 100 horsepower more, but the torque 738 in the BMW compared to 627. So over a hundred,

111 pounds of found peat, found peat of torque, found peat. Is that what I just said?

That's weird. I don't think that's a real word at all. The BMW weighs 4,000, 5,460 pounds,

5460. The Audi came in 4866. 4866 is still a lot. Yeah, 55, 5500 pounds is basically the same as

an F 150 truck. You know, we weigh everything on those scales. That's basically what a Ram 1500

on F 150 weighs. So power to weight ratio 7.61 pounds per horsepower for the BMW 7.81 883 for

the Audi. But it feels you know that you might say with 700 pounds is it that much? Yeah,

really feels it. And the BMW also does some strange things that when you go when you go,

obviously we're like pushing these things as hard as they will go. And when you go for the

brakes, you go for the brakes hard. But the BMW does this weird thing where it activates 100%

of braking. And the way we like to drive these things is it's actually sort of threshold braking

where you kind of like and then you're sort of trail breaking into corner. So the way to go

fast on this thing is really to like manage the transition into the corner, get the car balanced

and then get back on the power as quickly as possible for something in particularly something

big and heavy, slow in fast out. But the BMW just doesn't allow you to really modulate the

braking. As soon as you go hard for the brakes, it goes, Oh, you're obviously doing some sort of

emergency stop. And it's like, it's an M car, you want to be able to kind of like really finesse.

You know what it's doing. The Audi is an old car now. And there's rumors that they're going to

replace it with a with a hybrid or plug in hybrid, I hope not. But the I still think it's

by far the best car Audi makes right now from the quality of the cabin to the way that it looks,

the way it sounds, the way that it goes. If there was one car for me right now, it'd be an RS6,

I think it's an awesome thing. I here's the thing about the Audi is I think Audi should

really, really take a look at their customers on this car and go listen, if we're going to do an

A6 wagon, make it a hybrid, do what you want plug in, whatever. But if you're going to do the high

performance version, don't just turn the wick up a little bit like stick with the program with the

RS6, give it the big engine, give it the turbos. I mean, if you're going to do a new version of it

anyway, I get it. Maybe maybe the street version could be the hybrid, the plug in smaller engine,

six cylinder, whatever. But the high performance variant was just how the enthusiasts have caught

onto that car so much. I love that thing so much. There's entire, you know, events around, you know,

the high performance wagons, all the Avant events. I think they should just go,

I got no problem with that. You want the A6 wagon? Cool. We'll give you a six cylinder hybrid.

You want the RS6, twin turbo V8 all wheel drive, give it some extra power,

fuel mileage be damned. We can make it work. It's a bit, it's a little bit like what Porsche has

done with the GT cars where they say, okay, you know, we're going to hold the naturally aspirated GT3

and, you know, we can just build, we'll build that and it might not be faster in a straight

line. In fact, you won't be faster in a straight line than a GTS with the hybrid. And this is

the problem. Everybody's chasing horsepower. What you need is somebody to be bold and this

somebody to probably, you know, overpower the marketing department and say, look,

you know what, being used at seven horsepower, don't care. Yeah, 600 horsepower is plenty. We're

going to be just a great car. Nobody needs more than 600 horsepower. Let's make it four and a

thousand pounds and 600 horsepower, not five and a half thousand pounds and 800 horsepower because

there's no point. Yeah. And I think that there's a real sort of mindset thing because it's certainly

the Germans recently, it's just horsepower, horsepower, horsepower, but you know, add horsepower,

add hybrid, the add weight, add bigger brakes, add bigger tires, and you're just in this kind

of vicious circle. Yeah. Somebody has to sit there, which a bit like Porsche have done to be

and just say, you know what, it doesn't really matter.

Right. And, okay, so this brings up the next question. As we lean into BMW, the news from

BMW is M3 and M3, a all-electric sedan. It's got M in front of it. So is this the route we're going?

Was there a lesson learned here? I think they're going to do,

yeah, they're going to do like a, they'll definitely have a gas version of the M3.

They may have a gas hybrid, but then they're going to have an all-electric car, which will

have the M-badging, and they're talking about having four motors, which will give them a huge

amount of potential for tuning. So basically, you have a motor at each corner. Yeah. And then

all the software that they can do, they can basically just manage the power and make it

behave pretty much however you like. I mean, this isn't new, Rivian has a quad motor,

quad motor truck. And then it's like, how much power do you want? And of course,

in the electric world, horsepower is much more accessible than it is in the gas world. So,

you know, there are rumors of, you know, 1,000 horsepower in an electric M3 through these four

electric motors. So it's going to be anything. It's going to be insanely fast. They're going to

be able to play with all the electronics like Hyundai's done with the Ioniq 5N. So if you want

it in drift mode, you can decouple the motors at the front, and it'll go sideways. You want it to

do this, you want it to do that. So, you know, it's interesting, it'll now be a car designed by

the software engineers with some input. It will. Although BMW seem to admit they've,

they've, I don't want to say they've learned their lesson, but they pointed out the fact that

they're going to do everything they can to make this thing light. They don't want it to weigh

M5 weight. They want to use whatever sort of composites and carbon fibers and, I don't know,

aluminum, magnesium. I don't know what the plan is going to be, but they want to,

they want to trim the weight a little bit on this thing.

That's got to be the, and you know, how do you get your motors down? How do you get your batteries?

You know, this is, this is the next big thing for all the EVs. How do we get, you know,

there's talk of going to solid state, things like that. How do we get the weight of the

batteries down? The motors is less of a problem. You know, can we get, you know, can we get back

to sort of lighter agile cars? And it also, even from an emissions perspective, it makes a difference

because you don't have the emissions from the brakes. You don't have the emissions from the tires.

But you have four motors and 100 kilowatt battery. So unless there's some new battery technology

that's allowing them to do it much more compact and lighter and obviously maybe center of the car,

you know, or if they're, imagine that, that skateboard platform, if you will, that, and,

and again, this technology is going to be used on the IX3 or whatever. It's going to be used

across the board. It just, in this instance, they're saying, they're saying, we're developing

this, this platform, if you will, that is an EV platform. Maybe we can make it, you know, two

motors. We can make it four motors. We can make the battery a little larger, bigger, longer,

shorter. We can do an SUV. We can do sedan. But if we're going to do it, we can do a high performance

variant of it as well, which is why we're getting to this M3 version of it. But yeah, that modular

platform, like on that alone, can they get the weight down? Because that would trickle to the

other vehicles as well. It's going to be a super thing. If they build like a, a gas M3 with 500

horsepower and an electric M3 with 1000 horsepower, which is actually going to sell. It's a, it's,

it's a real conundrum for a man. I don't know whether they'll do like a hybrid in between or

a plug-in hybrid. I'm kind of over plug-in hybrids. I just think that they're an interim technology

that isn't really a good answer to anything. I like hybrids because I think they're just

adding efficiency to a gas engine. I like EVs. It's the in-between bit that I struggle with,

particularly on performance cars, because once the battery's gone, the battery's gone, and then

all you, you know, big chunky performance is gone. Yeah. All right, let's, let's move on. There's one

more I wanted to get into Mercedes S-Class. You know, we, we spoke last week, I guess, with Nick

on your team, and he was basically saying, look, the leader of, of technology is usually the S-Class,

right? And, and Mercedes would trickle down from there. Other car companies would look at

that as well and go, that's the benchmark. What can we do? So it's a big thing. It's a big deal

to have a new S-Class. So I'm going to, I'm going to bring it up here as well. You can tell us about

what you know on the S-Class, aside from this very interesting wrap that's like gold and

purple. Yeah, that's right. The S-Class has always been, I mean, we talked about last week, the S-Class

has always been this thing that, you know, the, the pioneer of technology, and it's got harder and

harder, you know, where does the technology come from now? Because of all the democratization of

safety and everything else. But this, this has got something genuinely new, which is it's gonna,

it's not that easy thing to explain, but basically it's going to use the cloud

to change your suspension damper system. So basically what's going to happen? You're gonna,

you're gonna drive along and then if there is a pothole, something else, which frankly,

if you live in LA, that's every six yards anyway, it will upload to the cloud and say,

there's a giant pothole here on the entry to the 405. And then every other S-Class will get this

information and then it will preset the suspension to take account the fact that you're about to

whack a pothole, which is crazy when you think about it. I mean, we already have a little bit

of this technology, a lot of like, if you get in a Corvette, it will have, you know, geo-tagging

for when to lift the nose. So if every night you drive it home and, you know, your driveway needs

the nose to lift, it will automatically do it. So more so with Rolls Royce, if you remember.

So Rolls Royce, when I guess it was BMW, Williams, when they got out of F1, they took a lot of those

engineers to Rolls Royce. And Rolls Royce has, they use like GPS technology and the topography

of the road. And as you are driving the Rolls, it presets the transmission. It gets it ready

for what's ahead of it. Are you climbing a hill or are you doing, not necessarily the dampers

like you're talking about, but it does prepare the car for that. So it makes the whole thing just

like, I don't just smoother overall. And so it's using something now, not necessarily the cloud,

it's using accessing satellite data, GPS data or whatever, probably some of its own maps. I don't

know what. The cloud data thing is interesting because is this kind of like using Google Maps or

your CarPlay Maps where it gets data from everybody else's phone to go, oh, there's a traffic jam.

So does some other S-Class have to hit a pothole before it tells the next S-Class down the street?

Yeah, I think that's pretty much it. They use, I think it probably still has this technology

where it scans the road in front. I mean, that was the way they were doing it, the previous

generation car. It was basically looking at the road and adjusting the suspension. So yeah,

I think somebody's got to take one for the team. That's what I was wondering. He's like,

how many wheels need a crack here in LA before the next S-Class that's three miles behind you

gets a smooth ride? It was very funny driving in France over Christmas because you know the

speed camera and the speed trap information on Google. That's illegal in France. So I was actually

switching between all these different mapping things saying, why isn't it telling me where

the cameras are, where this is? And of course, like these bands. So Google has to take that

technology out. So it'd be interesting with this. Does it depend on which country you are in the

world as well? I mean, there's probably plenty of S-Classes in LA. Probably not that many S-Classes

in sort of North Dakota or somewhere like that or some of the snow belt states. So I don't know.

I feel like with a lot of this stuff, it's like they've got to keep adding gadgets to justify

an S-Class and will it transform the car? I don't know. But we'll see.

Now, that being said, as far as we know on this car, for those of you that thought maybe the

S-Class was going to end up being all EV, that doesn't seem to be the case. They're going to do

six cylinder and eight cylinder engines. I guess plug-in hybrids. I don't know if they're just doing

regular hybrids or plug-in hybrids. They'll do hybrids for Europe. They'll have to,

whether it depends on how big it gets here. So we should see twin-turbo straight sixes,

and then we should see some V8s with, I don't know, maybe there's hybrid technology on the six.

I don't know. Maybe on both, I don't know. They'll have mild hybrid stuff across the

board. It is still the default, and it'll be a really just a really nice way to travel.

Yeah, right. S-Class is always the pinnacle of luxury today.

The S-Class is such a nice buy. I mean, you've got to kind of accept that they're running costs

to be fairly high and everything else, but it's such a nice way to travel, and they don't hold

their value that well. So get an S-Class off lease or something. That's just such a nice car.

I'd want to dig into what's the right year or a couple of years. So you kind of have to look a

little bit of the maintenance costs and the reliability. There's Mercedes, some Mercedes

Benz vehicles from a while back. You're like, this car is flawless, but after a while, the airbag

suspension never works, and the rear end is always dragging on the ground because the airbags are

flat. There's some issues like that you have to think about. So I'd want to look into more what

are the proper years. I was looking at this the other day too, is Lexus LS. Can you get a 15-year-old

Lexus LS for $11,000 and have it be a really, really nice car? By the way, you could probably

still get one with like 85,000 miles on it. It doesn't have to be 180,000 miles. You can get one

that's pretty nice. So yeah, the S-Class and something like the Lexus LS, you go, if you figure

out the couple little things to avoid, like maybe it's airbag suspension, I don't know, but maybe

it's something or else, or the engine. Somebody may go, the six has belts, the eight has chains,

so the eight's better. There's that. There's also just take a warranty. As you know, we're

owned, Edmunds is owned by CarMax and the CarMax warranties and things like that. That makes a lot

of sense to me. It just takes the stress out of it, particularly on a high-value vehicle like that

with a lot of complexity. Yeah, just for fun, we should find the highest mileage S-Class on CarMax

and just buy the warranty and just go, here we go, buddy. See what you're going to do for me, CarMax.

Years ago, Edmunds bought a 600 of V12 Mercedes, but it was the Mercedes from the 90s era where

they weren't, you know, Mercedes went through a period where they were really not well-built

and that was just cost of fortune. So I think you've got to be careful, but if you get like a

three-year-old car off lease and then either have a bit left of the manufacturer's warranty on

certain bits or you add like an aftermarket warranty, used car warranty, then it's a lovely way to

travel. Yeah. All right. I think we've got to wrap things up for today. What else? We're missing

anything else? I think we've got to- There's a lot. If you check out edmunds.com. There's just a lot

going on at the moment. You know, the year's kicked off. Things are gathering pace.

Detroit Auto Show. Auto Show Detroit, yeah, which I'm not at. I mean, it's just not,

it's not quite the draw that it once was. But there's still news coming out of there. So we'll

start to gather a little bit more of that maybe for next week or so. Yeah. Cool. All right.

What else to talk about? Thanks, guys, everybody. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch you

next week. Until then, keep the air and the spare and the bag in the wheel.

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CarCast+Edmunds - Mustang eBike, Ford Racing in 2026, new Mustang Dark Horse SC and more.

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