Ford Performance Is Treating EVs Like The Cool Thing They Are

October 28, 20213 years ago Jennifer Sensiba 0 Comments

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Ford Performance recently took Vaughn Gittin, Jr to the Faroe Islands to make a really neat video. Without making a huge deal of the vehicle’s efficiency, range, or green credibility, they just had some fun with the vehicle and showed customers that EVs can be as much fun as any ICE Mustang.

Free rein: Faroe Islands is here! Check out the full video -> https://t.co/Je2vUEP7ma #FreeReinFaroeIslands #MustangMachE1400 pic.twitter.com/VbfihrgC9I

— Ford Performance (@FordPerformance) October 27, 2021

After an introduction/teaser opening, the video starts the story with Vaughn Gittin on a ferry ship, sitting in the Mustang Mach-E 1400. The 1400 is no normal Mach-E. It’s a prototype built by Ford and RTR Vehicles meant to show that electric power can do anything the most exotic ICE cars can do. It lays out 1400 horsepower to the wheels (hence the name). It has a total of SEVEN electric motors, and has body panels optimized for downforce.

You might be wondering, as I was, how they managed to get that many motors to all work together to turn four wheels. It turns out that they’ve attached three motors to the front wheels and four to the back, with multiple motors driving single driveshafts (in other words, motors are lined up in a row, with the front of one motor behind the back of another, all pushing together). These multi-motor shafts drive differentials that drive the wheels.

Computer control allows for on-the-fly changes in power distribution to different wheels, allowing for maximum versatility. Power can be put where it’s most needed for any given event, and the vehicle can do series regenerative braking to give the high-performance friction brakes some much-needed help on the track or tarmac.

Driving all of these motors are special nickel manganese cobalt pouch cells cooled with a massive dielectric coolant system. This allows the car to not only make great power, without requiring excessive cool-down time between racing runs.

With all of this power — and not just power, but intelligent power — they’re able to outperform most any ICE Mustang on its home turf. Doing everything from NASCAR racing to Gymkhana, it stands toe-to-toe or beats the best Mustangs with the best drivers.

As he sits, he asks the vehicle, “You ready to rock?” and it displays a shrug emoji ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) to say “why not?”. While nobody is seriously claiming that the Mach-E 1400 possesses artificial intelligence, it was a fun thing that kept recurring throughout the video to make it fun and give the car some character.

As the car pulls up to the dock, you think that he’s going to fly out of the boat as soon as the ramp drops and start tearing up the island’s streets, but suddenly a woman appears in front of the ramp, offering him a gift and welcoming him to the island. He then takes a slow stroll through the town, and it becomes pretty clear that he couldn’t have safely driven crazily on those streets.

But as soon as he got to the edge of town, he went crazy in any way he could for the rest of the video. To make it entertaining, he even played soccer with it.

One final thing — the Faroe Islands are stunning, and they were sure to make use of the landscape as much as they could in this short film. That alone makes it worth a watch!

Here’s the video, embedded from YouTube: