Ford refused to build a right-hand-drive Mustang for fifty straight years. The seventh-generation car finally lands in the UK, with a V8-only engine lineup and a price tag that reflects just how rare that decision still is.
For the first fifty years of its existence, the Ford Mustang was built for one kind of driver: the kind who sat on the left. Every Mustang sold anywhere in the world before 2015 forced UK, Australian, and Japanese buyers to import a car that put the steering wheel on the wrong side of the road entirely. Then Ford did something it had never done in half a century of building America’s original pony car — it engineered a genuine factory right-hand-drive Mustang and sold it through official UK dealers. Now the seventh-generation car has landed on British soil, and Auto Express put it through the one test that matters most for an American muscle car in Europe: does it actually work over there? The answer says as much about Ford’s UK strategy as it does about the car itself.
The Barrier Ford Took 50 Years to Break
Auto Express, one of the UK’s longest-running motoring publications, sent reviewer Tom to find out whether the new Mustang can hold its own in a market that increasingly measures cars by emissions ratings and electric range rather than horsepower. The review leans hard into the practical side of ownership — cabin materials, technology, and whether a two-door pony car makes sense as a daily driver on narrow British roads — rather than treating the test as a straight-line performance showcase.
That approach frustrated some viewers, who pointed out the video spends only a small fraction of its runtime actually showing the car being driven. But the questions Tom does answer are the ones a UK buyer weighing a purchase in the tens of thousands of pounds actually needs answered: what’s real leather versus vinyl in the cabin, how the digital dashboard stacks up against rivals, and whether the right-hand-drive conversion feels like a proper reengineering job or an afterthought.
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Part of why it took Ford five full generations to bother is simple economics. Re-engineering a car for right-hand drive isn’t a matter of flipping the steering wheel to the other side — it means retooling the dashboard molding, relocating the pedal box, rerouting the wiring harness, and rebuilding the steering rack and column for a market that, compared to the US, buys a fraction of the volume. For a low-margin niche like a two-door V8 coupe, that math rarely worked in Ford’s favor until the Mustang’s global cachet made the investment worth it.
What Britain’s Order Book Looked Like in 2016
The reason any of this is remarkable goes back further than the current model. Ford built the Mustang exclusively in left-hand-drive form from its 1964 launch all the way through five full generations, meaning anyone in a right-hand-drive country who wanted one had to buy through a grey-market importer and pay to have it converted after the fact. That changed only with the sixth-generation S550 Mustang in 2015, when Ford, for the first time in the nameplate’s history, engineered and built a genuine factory right-hand-drive version and sold it through its own UK dealer network.
The UK’s appetite for the car caught even Ford off guard. Roughly 1,800 orders came in before the first cars arrived, and the order book was already full into 2016 before most buyers had even seen one on the road. By early 2016, more than 1,000 UK customers had taken delivery, turning what could have been a niche curiosity into one of the more unexpected European success stories for an American performance car.
Why the UK Mustang Skips Half of America’s Engine Lineup
Ten years and two more generations later, the seventh-generation S650 Mustang picks up that same UK program — but Ford has trimmed the options along the way. The four-cylinder EcoBoost model that anchors the entry-level US lineup isn’t sold in Britain at all; every right-hand-drive Mustang that reaches a UK driveway comes only with the naturally aspirated 5.0-litre V8, officially rated at 453PS (roughly 447bhp) and 540Nm of torque. It’s a deliberate choice that keeps the UK car firmly in muscle-car territory rather than positioning it as an affordable sports coupe. Every version comes standard with Ford’s dash-spanning SYNC 4 setup, pairing a 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster with a 13.2-inch touchscreen.
That V8-only strategy comes at a price. UK dealer pricing for the range-topping Dark Horse trim starts north of £70,000 — noticeably higher than what American buyers pay for the same car, a markup common to imported performance models that have to be built in right-hand-drive form in relatively small numbers.
A Muscle Car Cross-Shopped Against German Coupes
What the video ultimately captures is a car caught between two identities. It’s still, mechanically, the same naturally aspirated V8 muscle car Americans have bought for decades, but wrapped around a package that now has to satisfy UK road widths, European safety expectations, and buyers who increasingly cross-shop it against German performance coupes rather than American muscle contemporaries that either no longer exist in showrooms or never crossed the Atlantic to begin with. Viewers picked up on some of the compromises that come with converting a car built for the other side of the road — several controls, including the handbrake and start/stop button placement, still sit exactly where they would on a left-hand-drive car, a quirk common to RHD conversions of American performance cars generally.
Even with those wrinkles, the fact that this conversation is happening at all — a UK auto outlet putting a Mustang through a practicality-focused review rather than treating it as an exotic curiosity — is the real story. Fifty years of exclusion turned into a decade of steady UK sales, and the seventh generation is Ford’s bet that British buyers still want the one thing a Mustang has always promised: a big V8 up front, no apologies required.
It also raises the stakes for whatever comes next. With both of Detroit’s other muscle-car nameplates gone from new-car showrooms entirely, the Mustang carries the whole genre on its own — in the US and, increasingly, overseas markets that spent fifty years watching from the sidelines. Whether Ford keeps investing in a factory right-hand-drive version for an eighth generation may come down to whether reviews like this one keep finding an audience willing to pay a premium for the privilege of driving one on the correct side of a British B-road.
Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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