Rumor: Mustang Hybrid to Get V8, AWD
The seventh-generation Ford Mustang is expected to arrive sometime around 2022, and it will likely bring with it the first-ever, long-gestured Mustang Hybrid. United Kingdom publication Autocar is feeding fuel into the flame of speculation in positing that the Mustang Hybrid will base its electrified powertrain around a V8 engine and feature all-wheel drive.
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Autocar says that it expects the next-generation Mustang to launch in Europe and the U.K., and that would require certain measures to be taken to help meet stringent emissions standards. Ford has made changes to the Mustang lineup in Europe to help appease those requirements, and it could continue on that course by only offering a V8 Mustang with a hybrid setup.
“Ford recently dropped automatic versions of the four-pot EcoBoost Mustang in the U.K. due to their low efficiency,” writes Autocar’s Lawrence Allan. “It’s also unlikely that a traditional V8 without some form of electrification would continue in Europe, given the need to meet stringent fleet average emissions targets.”
This would align with the news that Ford has also stopped development on the Focus RS because it can’t offer the hot hatch with a fully hybrid powertrain.
The V8 Mustang Hybrid rumor persists
Autocar posits that Ford would offer its Mustang Hybrid with a V8 as a means to appease European performance enthusiasts. It also lines up with a patent Ford filed some years ago for a “twin-motor drive system for hybrid vehicle” that features a V8 in the patent sketch. Because a hybrid system based around a V8 likely wouldn’t be incredibly efficient, Ford would likely market a Mustang Hybrid with a V8 more toward its performance abilities, a tack it’s already taking with its all-electric Mustang Mach-E.
This leads Autocar to believe that the Mustang Hybrid would also feature all-wheel drive — while this may have seemed blasphemous at any other point in time, the idea of an AWD Mustang is now seemingly more feasible with the Mustang Mach-E on the horizon. According to Ford, around three-quarters of all reservations for the Mach E in America are for models with an all-wheel drivetrain.
At this point, we’ve got a long while to wait before any firm details about the Mustang Hybrid emerge, so we may as well just keep on speculating.
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Kyle S. Johnson lives in Cincinnati, a city known by many as “the Cincinnati of Southwest Ohio.” He enjoys professional wrestling, Halloween, and also other things. He has been writing for a while, and he plans to continue to write well into the future. See more articles by Kyle.