Do you dream of doing a family road trip and wonder if the fully electric Ford Mustang Mach-E Rally is the ultimate car to do it in?! Well I did wonder that so with a family wedding invitation in the UK I saw the perfect opportunity to drive three generations of my family 500km in the fully electric Mustang Mach-E Rally! From the countryside of Bedfordshire…
…to quaint and windy seaside town of Ilfracombe on the north coast of Devon (via Plymouth on the south coast).
In Australia I previously drove the Ford Mustang Mach-E Premium and reviewed it as a BabyDrive with my family.
It was very practical for families with a spacious interior that will fit three child seats across in the back with good legroom. You can read more about this here.
It also has a very generous size boot that will easily fit a Thule Urban Glide 3 twin pram in the boot. Read more about family practicality and boot storage here.
This Mach-E Rally is a super sporty and fast version of the Mach-E GT, sold in the UK and elsewhere but not yet available in Australia. The Mach-E Rally Pack adds £2250 to the price of the £74,540 GT model which takes the Mach-E up to £76,790 (equivalent to nearly $158,000 Australian Dollars!). For reference in Australia the Mach-E GT is $97,374 before on-road costs.
The Mach-E Rally goes from 0-100km/h in just 3.6 seconds! That's similar to a Porsche 911!
It has a top speed of 200km/h! Unfortunately there are no roads in the UK where I could test that out and a trip to Germany wasn't on my itinerary!
This striking Grabber Yellow body colour is free on the the Mach-E Rally model with 19-inch rally inspired white wheels with all terrain tyres. It stands out in a crowd and in the beautiful UK countryside it blends in with the endless fields of canola that are stitched together with seams of trees and hedges, like the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz!
The Rally upgrade includes rally body styling with large rear spoiler, RallyCross tuned MagneRide suspension with 20mm raised height. Unique ‘RallySport' drive mode, hood stripes and side graphics, front and rear underbody shields, gloss white inserts on the seat backs and steering wheel and Rally embossed seats.
Growing up in the UK the Ford Cosworth models were what boy racers wanted and the Mustang Mach-E Rally feels like a 21st Century one of those!
1- EV charging in the UK is different
First things first, the Ford Mustang Mach-E Rally is fully electric so I needed to work out the battery range, our route and if and where we are going to stop to recharge. The Mach-E Rally has a battery range of 424km. As I have learnt with fully electric cars that battery range vastly differs depending on how much you use the climate control, your speed, weather, media screen usage etc. The battery range is very clearly visible in the 10.2-inch driver display screen so you can keep an eye on it easily while driving.
So erring on the side of caution I plan for a 350km battery range so we will need to stop to recharge the battery during the journey.
I used a great app called ZapMap, free to download in the UK, which shows me where all the chargers are along my planned route, whether they are working, how many are available for use, how much it costs, the type of payment whether they take contactless payment and the type of charger etc.
It's safe to say there are A LOT more chargers in the UK than there are in Australia! The infrastructure is so much better which gives you a lot more options for charging along your journey. A lot of the chargers are in the carpark of Starbucks, hotels or shopping centres which makes them convenient. However it does start to make recharging expensive! Especially with kids with you, it can add the price of a few babycinos and snacks to every recharge!
Some public chargers were easier to use than others. Some like the Osprey chargers have contactless so you could just tap your credit card to pay which was really simple and easy especially coming from overseas. The screens on the chargers show you the amount it cost, battery percentage charged etc.
Others required you to download their app and add money to your account and keep topping that up. I didn't find this very convenient, only being there for one week I didn't want wasted money sitting in an app I could no longer use once I left the country, or to have to have multiple apps, so I didn't use these chargers. Also, a lot of chargers have both CCS2 and CHADEMO plugs, meaning they only have one that most cars use as CHADEMO models are rare (Nissan Leaf and that's about it).
We set off on our journey with a stop scheduled after Plymouth in Salisbury at the Waitrose supermarket carpark. This was very convenient as we could stop and have lunch in the restaurant and grab the shopping we needed for our holiday before we reached Ilfracombe. So easy to use, I tasked the representative for the oldest generation of our family with working out how to use it!
She mastered it pretty quickly! Some chargers screens tell you how long the charge is going to take but others, like this one, don't.
We learnt that using the cafes and shops every time you are charging can start to get very expensive and it's not very healthy eating out every time you need to charge your car! Each charge was taking about an hour so having games in the car for entertainment for that amount of time was our best solution and made it a lot more fun (especially when the weather was very British)!
Phone based guessing games became a favourite…
…and we played a lot of card games!
2- Driving the Ford Mustang Mach-E Rally is more than just fun
In the UK certain motorways allow you to use Ford Bluecruise. ‘Hands off, eyes on' driver assistance technology (a monthly subscription is required). I got to test this out on our journey. The car alerted me when we were driving on a road where ‘Bluecruise' was allowed and I could take my hands off the steering wheel and my feet off the pedals!! CRAZY! I thought it might be scary but actually on the long, wide, straight motorways where it was allowed it made perfect sense and I enjoyed scaring the rear passengers by using it!
The Rally model Mach-E has multiple selectable drive modes (Active, Whisper, Untamed) and One Pedal Drive. I used the one pedal drive for most of my driving as find it most intuitive way to drive electric cars and it helps contribute to battery re-gen more (where slowing down puts energy back into your battery).
The Mustang Mach-E Rally is a VERY fast car with a lot of possibility for driving fun but you are limited to how much you can actually experience on the road. The speed limits are such that you can feel frustrated! But just just knowing it can do it makes it an exciting drive. The acceleration is incredibly fast 0-100km/h in just 3.6 seconds means you can pull out to overtake or fit into gaps at roundabouts and junctions with complete confidence.
Being fully electric it is nice and quiet and incredibly smooth to drive too.
The Mache-E Rally took us very comfortably on all types of roads, the motorways, narrow and winding country roads and around town. On all these road types the ride was just as good. On highways you are cocooned from the outside noise and without engine noise it's quiet.
On the country roads it corners really well and bumps are absorbed and being bright Grabber Yellow it's easy for on coming tractors and farmers to see you coming!
Around the tiny little coastal town of Ilfracombe with its narrow cobbled streets, speed bumps and carparks the Mach-E was great.
It rolled around it all in a relaxed manner and visibility is very good for the driver so you can park etc easily.
The Ford Mustang Mach-E Rally is full of safety and ADAS tech so you are confident driving it with family on board. Including blind spot monitoring (BSM) with cross traffic alert. Lane keeping assist (LKA) and lane departure warning (LDW), pre-collision assist including: collision mitigation, forward collision warning (FCW), dynamic brake support, automated emergency braking, distance alert/distance indication and evasive steering.
3- The Ford Mustang Mach-E Rally has plenty of space and comfort for five adults
Passengers in the back were very comfortable and there was ample space for two VERY tall teenage boys 186cm+ in the back and three other adults in the car. Legroom is VERY good.
With the tall teenagers in the back beside their grandmother they were all very comfortable with plenty of seat space that no one was too close to each other. They all loved the enormous glass windows and said how good the visibility out is so they could enjoy the countryside as it changed along the route.
In the front it is extremely comfortable, the seats embossed with the Rally graphics with electric adjustments.
Bootspace is good in the Mustang Mach-E Rally. Their lovely medium size dog Dobbo fits really comfortably in the boot. The floor is nice and flat and smooth so dogs can travel comfortably too.
The boot will comfortably fit eleven shopping bags when empty.
The Thule Urban Glide 3 single is the ultimate all-terrain stroller…
… with the back wheels on, fits in the boot of the Ford Mustang Mach-E with one shopping bag.
We easily fit all our luggage for five people in the boot and the Frunk held a fair amount too!
4- The Ford Mustang Mach-E Rally has great media and tech
The dash is dominated by an enormous portrait 15.5-inch touchscreen media screen.
As well as a 10.2-inch digital instrument cluster in front of the driver.
The ten-speaker Bang and Olufsen sound system on this car included a dashboard sound bar making the eclectic taste of music across three generations of our family sound fantastic for our 500km!
It has wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with two front and two rear charging ports for charging devices while travelling as well as a wireless phone charging pad too.
The heated front seats and steering wheel were very much appreciated on the cold UK mornings!
The panoramic roof made the interior feel even more open, spacious and light.
5- The journey and the destination were both amazing
The journey to and from Ilfracombe was very fun and comfortable in the Mustang Mach-E Rally. Ilfracombe is a historic harbour town with some gorgeous little cobbled laneways and interesting buildings.
It's a great town for walking the tiny laneways…
… and out up around the cliffs…
… the coastline is stunning.
The harbour where the boats come in and out…
… has some great restaurants and cafes selling the day's catch of fresh crab, lobster, prawns etc.
When the tide was in it looked beautiful…
… when the tides out you can see the boats resting on the sand and the full shape of the harbour walls.
There's a good art scene in Ilfracombe, including a 20.25m tall Damien Hirst statue that dominated the top of a cliff mound looking out over the cliffs.
Called ‘Verity', after the Latin noun, ‘a true principle or belief.'
The sculpture is an allegory for truth and justice. Her stance is taken from Edgar Degas's Little Dancer of Fourteen Years (c. 1881). An anatomical cross-section of her head and torso reveal her skull and the developing foetus inside her womb. Standing on a base of scattered legal books, Verity holds the traditional symbols of Justice – a sword and scales. Representing truth, her scales are hidden and off-balance behind her back, whilst her sword is held confidently in her upstretched arm. Verity was fabricated in bronze in over 40 individual sand castings at Pangolin Editions foundry, in Gloucestershire. Her phosphor-bronze surface is 20mm thick and her internal support structure is a single piece of stainless steel. The sculpture is weather and lightning-proof and underwent extensive wind-tunnel testing to ensure her capability of withstanding the force of high winds and sea spray.
For a small seaside town there are a few charging options and I had no trouble getting a space at them.
Ilfracombe was also the home of Olympic triple jump gold medalist Jonathan Edwards.
With a mosaic and bronze tribute along the cliff top…
… that shows the length of his winning jump.
The Mustang Mach-E Rally made a fantastic steed for our three generation road trip and its sleek design and Grabber Yellow colour stood out against the rugged dark grey cliffs of Ilfracombe.
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