Earlier this month, a brand-new Ford Mustang rolled into my driveway and hummed itself to a halt. The scene was a straight shot of Americana concentrate: The dirt crunched beneath the car’s tires; the sun glinted off the red paint on its aptly equine-esque snout, helping it easily outshine every other vehicle on the block. Then the front driver’s-side door opened, and out emerged not a middle-aged man who’d bought into the brand’s bid to be “cool, clever, and tough,” but instead … me.
Me, with my herbal tea and cat-fur-covered Patagonia backpack, my wallet full of Trader Joe’s receipts. Me, an Asian American woman in her 30s who hates roller coasters, who’s never finished an entire serving of beer, and whose ideal car for the past two decades has been a Toyota Prius. “You are the last person I would expect to buy a Mustang,” one of my colleagues told me after recovering from a laughing fit.
I do have an explanation for this discrepancy, and it’s not one that die-hard Mustang fans will necessarily like. My new car is a Mustang—it’s just a Mustang Mach-E. It runs on electricity, and the motor, rather than the brand, is the main reason I, and so many others like me, are now in the driver’s seat. Which means that nowadays, when a Mustang pulls up, “you just have no idea who’s coming out of that car,” says Kashef Majid, a marketing expert at the University of Mary Washington, in Virginia. Classically branded electric vehicles are undergoing a battery-powered identity crisis that’s changing not just their engines, but potentially their passengers too.
A mere two decades ago, when a new class of hybrids were being bought up by people who were sort of, well, crunchy, electrification seemed antithetical to flash. Those cars appealed primarily to people who prioritized minimizing pollution over maximizing acceleration, says Nathan Wyeth, a clean-energy expert who previously worked on EV adoption. Their fully…
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