Chances are pretty good that if you’re buying a Ford Mustang GT, you are doing so for any number of reasons up to and including looking like the coolest kid on your block. You will most certainly look cool at the wheel of a 2018 Mustang GT, and you will almost certainly love the throaty sound that the 5.0-liter V8 makes as it roars to life; depending on how early you set out for work, however, your neighbors may not care for it as much.
Take, for example, Detroit native Steve von Foerster, whose neighbors narc’ed on him for backing out of his driveway in his Shelby GT350 Mustang and got the cops involved. Sounds like a lame neighbor who should, dunno, maybe wear earmuffs to protect their delicate sensibilities from anything louder than a bird fart, but let’s digress.
Point is, Ford got wind of Steve’s story and put the Mustang development team onto the idea of developing Quiet Exhaust mode and Quiet Start for the 2018 Mustang GT. Ford calls its industry-first Quiet Start “Good Neighbor Mode,” but it could also very easily be called “Appease the Old Crone Who Lives Across the Street and Listens to Her Stories on Full Blast All Day but Never Gets the Cops Called on Her Because People in This Neighborhood Have a Mutual Respect for One Another or At Least We Thought They Did Mode.” Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as easily, though.
“When sounds get up into the upper-70-decibel range, that’s typically about when they start to bother people,” said Matt Flis, Ford exhaust development engineer. “With Quiet Start activated, the decibel level of the new Mustang GT drops by about 10 decibels to a much more comfortable 72 decibels – about the level of a household dishwasher.”
So that’s what you do: use Quiet Start to placate the bitter old man who lives on the corner and wards kids off of his lawn, pull into his driveway in the dead and dark of night, and use the 2018 Mustang GT’s electronic line-lock to do a sick burnout. Then punch it into Drag Strip mode and peel out like lightning. Or maybe don’t. What, you wanna get arrested?
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