Your hands are tight on the wheel. You’re ready to put the pedal to the metal in your new 2024 Ford Mustang. You want to see what speed you can get out of its new 2.3L four-cylinder EcoBoost engine—a dynamo that can give you 315 hp and 350 lb-ft of torque. You’ve worked hard to be able to buy this new Mustang model, and you want to see if it lives up to all your hopes and dreams. What are those hopes and dreams? They’re all about speed and style, right? You’ve heard about Mustangs’ reputation with power, and their exteriors are obviously gorgeous…
With any vehicle, however, it’s the smaller, specialized features that will make or break it in the long run. You might enjoy a sports car that goes fast for the first few weeks, but if its interior features are dull, its seats aren’t comfortable, it needs a lot of repair work, etcetera, then you end up let down for a long time. That’s why examining a sports car’s lesser-known features is always a smart move before you buy or lease.
It’s the little details that make a car memorable ten or twenty years from now. If you think about your favorite former car, I bet there are small touches that you recall—ones that really made it stand out. Luckily, the 2024 Ford Mustang will come equipped with plenty of those details, making it memorable for more than just the obvious.
Driver Assistance Technology
The Ford Mustang has some of the best technology you can find in any vehicle on the road today—certainly the best among consumer sports cars. While driver assistance technology might not sound exciting, this is the most practical component we’ll talk about because it lets you have fun while knowing your Mustang’s safety software is working overtime to keep you protected while you enjoy your ride.
One of our favorite driver assistance features is the Intelligent Adaptive Cruise Control. Cruising in your Mustang sounds ideal, but we’ve long been iffy about cruise control; unless there are no cars near you, cruise control is often not nearly as useful as it claims to be. Enter the Mustang’s Intelligent Adaptive Cruise Control. This cruise control will automatically adjust your speed depending on what’s going on around you on the highway. It will sense how close you are to the vehicle in front of you and acclimate accordingly. This takes stress off you and makes it less likely you’ll have to keep exiting cruise control to adjust your pace.
The Mustang comes with all of Ford’s incredible safety systems, too. It includes the Ford Co-Pilot360, Ford’s famed safety program that features lane-keeping, evasive steering, and blind spot monitoring, among others.
Drift Brake
The 2024 Mustang comes with a feature called “Drift Brake,” which lets you do one of the most enjoyable sports car activities: drifting, where your car almost drives sideways. This feature is intended only for track use and not on public roads.
The drift brake is electronic, giving you more control over it than the hand brakes of yore, and it immediately lets go once you take your hand off it. The drifting you can do once it’s engaged is not only exciting but smooth—far smoother than past drift brakes would let you go, giving this Mustang a futuristic feel.
An Inspired Cabin
The cabin of the new Mustang is based on the structure of a fighter jet. Sounds too good to be true? It’s not. Glance at the Mustang’s interior, and you’ll notice its shape does have a more aggressive feel than the usual cabin. Even the 13.2-inch center touchscreen is curved toward the driver’s seat to give your cabin a jet vibe, as if you’re mastering the controls.
Ford knows that the excitement of a sports car should translate to its interior. Instead of being austere, the Mustang aims to enhance the experience with an interior that boosts your adrenaline as you rocket down the road.
But if you’re worried that the fighter jet design means you won’t be traveling in comfort, you need to fret no more. The Mustang comes with comfortable cloth seats that you can upgrade to include suede vinyl inserts. Even the wheel is designed for comfort: its bottom is flat so that you have an easier time not only steering but settling yourself into the driver’s seat. You’ll have the benefits of a sleek jet-inspired cabin with none of the downsides.
The Mustang’s Fob: Your Key to Showing Off
This is a shameless gimmick for the most part, but that does not mean it’s not a lot of fun. Shameless gimmicks can be a blast. In this case, you can use your Mustang’s fob to rev the engine of your car even if you’re not in it, getting the roar to be nice and loud.
Is there a purpose to this beyond being able to show off to friends and family? Well, you could use it to locate your Mustang if it’s lost in a crowded parking lot, we suppose… but, yeah, it’s mostly to show off. Isn’t that part of the fun of a sports car, though?
The Ideal Sound System
Part of the sports car lifestyle is the feeling of freedom, and an integral part of creating that feeling involves music. Taking off in your Mustang while you’re listening to your favorite hard rock or EDM artist is a moment that cannot be replicated elsewhere. Therefore, a sports car should always come with the best sound system possible.
The 2024 Ford Mustang does just that with its 12-speaker B&O sound system that can get your ears ringing with how loud and deep it can pump the tunes. The inside of your Mustang can feel like a rave, especially when you factor in the interior’s customizable ambient lighting.
The Mustang supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, too, so you can connect your playlist to your Mustang’s incredible speaker system instead of just hoping a song you like comes on the radio.
MagneRide System
The optional MagneRide system gives your Mustang better suspension and increases the performance of the sports car’s dampers. When you’re driving fast, you don’t want a change in the terrain to result in your Mustang suddenly bumping and twisting. This improved damping system makes certain that your ride stays smooth even when the pavement doesn’t.
Thanks to the system’s use of magnetic fields, it adapts to road changes within what feels like milliseconds, especially compared to traditional systems that have you feeling the road a bit as they kick into gear. In short, you won’t be sacrificing performance when conditions change; your dampers and shock absorbers react better than ever, giving you and your passengers a smooth, floaty ride.
Driving Modes
The Mustang has six driving modes to ensure your rides stay smooth, using its different performance components, such as its traction system, to adjust to ground and weather conditions. If it’s wet outside, you can put your Mustang into Slippery mode, which will guide your transmission, steering, traction, and engine response to work in a fashion that meets the moment. You’ll be able to go more places in your sports car than you would have in the past, taking your car off the road and into nature. Previously, sports cars struggled once the pavement became soil. That’s not going to be the case with the 2024 Ford Mustang.
The six different driving modes exist for the same reason. Many of the other specialized features on this list are here to give you a better sense of control in your sports car. If you feel like you’re not as in command as you’d like to be, then it doesn’t matter how fast your sports car can go since you won’t feel comfortable pushing it to the limit. That’s not going to be a problem in the 2024 Ford Mustang.
The Takeaway
Combining all these features, you suddenly have a well-above-average sports car. No car aficionado should make a purchase on speed and look alone. The small, specialized features are what make a car memorable.
As awesome as it is to get off the line as fast as a fighter jet, it’s just as likely that you’ll recall the cool curved touchscreen as anything else. Small touches matter, and the 2024 Mustang has plenty.
