Ford’s Mexican-made Mustang Mach-E has muscled its way big time onto the roads of my west Los Angeles neighborhood. For years I rarely saw the vehicle, which first went on sale in December 2020, but these days they’re everywhere, in some pretty sweet color schemes, I must add. I saw a dark blue one the other day that made me take notice.
Thinking that perhaps it was my imagination, I checked to see whether Ford’s Jim Farley was running a promotion to clear out some inventory. Sure enough, Farley is not only running what might charitably be called clearance specials, the markdowns are so insane that even famed electronics retailer Crazy Eddie would blush.
How insane? Santa Monica Ford is offering a premium-trim 2025 Mach-E with an MSRP of $51,510. The dealership will let you drive it off the lot for $41,801. That’s a steal, and unlike Crazy Eddie Antar, you won’t wind up in the slammer.
You want something a little newer? Vista Ford in Woodland Hills has a 2026 Mach-E with an MSRP of $41,830 that it will let you have for as little as $36,729—and maybe even less, if you qualify for some of the other special offers in Farley’s galaxy of incentives.
There are also oodles of seemingly sweetheart lease deals to be had, but they require substantial down payments of several thousand dollars. My Michigan friend Bethann, a wizard with numbers, has one steadfast rule: Never EVER put money down on a lease. That’s because if you total the vehicle, the insurance company will cover the loss, but not the money you put down.
Over the years I’ve gone out of my way to mock the Mach-E because the vehicle is assembled in Mexico and Ford markets itself in red, white, and blue. The Mustang is an American icon, and building the nameplate in Mexico is as blasphemous as importing American flags sewn in China.
The gas engine Mustang deserves respect. Fittingly, on Wednesday, a 1965 Ford Mustang convertible—a star attraction at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair expo—was awarded the 38th entry into the National Historic Vehicle Register.
Here’s something else I’ve learned about the Mach-E over the years: People who buy it wholeheartedly rave about the vehicle. I’ve asked more than a half-dozen owners about their experiences with the EV and without exception they’ve all told me essentially the same thing:
“It’s a fun car to drive.”
That includes a veteran auto writer I admire and respect who also owns a Mach-E and once chastised me for knocking the vehicle.
“Eric, you really need to drive one,” she told me. “It’s a really fun car to drive.”
Here’s what MotorTrend said about the Mach-E:
“In a time when EVs are often criticized for lacking personality, the Mustang Mach-E stands out…The Mustang Mach-E is by far the most fun to drive, with a character that actually feels connected.”
THE MOST FUN TO DRIVE!
What a concept—one that gets me a lot more jazzed than hearing GM’s Mary Barra crow about her software-enabled vehicles. Incidentally, Barra’s vehicle platforms have been so problem-plagued that drivers struggled to get basic Google voice commands to function—a technology that is nearly two decades old.
Given the enthusiasm the Mach-E generates with its owners, it begs the question why the vehicle is so heavily discounted to move it off dealer lots. The answer: Farley made the classic CEO mistake of heeding the counsel of the Wall Street peanut gallery and believing his own press clips.
Farley became Ford’s CEO in 2020, and within a year he won the hearts and souls of investors and the corporate media eager to embrace the climate agenda. Among Farley’s early initiatives was being named co-chair of the Commission on the Future of Mobility along with legendary California environmental regulator Mary Nichols.
“I’m proud to be representing the auto industry in this effort — especially at a time when we are experiencing tremendous forces of disruption, from new technology to climate change,” Farley said. “We have a significant opportunity ahead, and I’m humbled and excited to be leading the charge alongside Mary Nichols and the other members of the commission.”
Wall Street and the corporate media lapped it up.
“It’s not too late for Ford to stage another comeback under Jim Farley,” crowed Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas, widely regarded as one of the absolute best in the business.
The day before Farley took over on Oct. 1, 2020, Ford stock closed at a sinister $6.66. It had lost 40% of its value during the previous three years. As Farley began chasing the Silicon Valley halo, Wall Street went into a frenzy, eventually driving Ford shares to a multi-decade high of over $25 in January 2022.
Fast forward to today, July 1, 2026: the EV euphoria has completely stalled out, the fire sales are on, and Ford stock has drifted back down to reality, closing at $13.64.
In all my reading about Farley’s and GM CEO Mary Barra’s aggressive embrace of EVs, I’ve yet to come across any public evidence that either company conducted market research validating that consumers were ready to quickly embrace electric vehicles. Instead, they relied on the breathless predictions of PhDs and MBAs from the Boston Consulting Group, who in 2021 were warning that the EV revolution was unfolding faster than they ever imagined.
While the Biden administration was prepared to spend unlimited billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing Ford’s and GM’s transformation to electric vehicles, Farley ignored an undeniable political reality: Joe Biden was unpopular with a huge swath of Americans and so were his green energy policies.
As a result, electric vehicles became perceived as being political, rather than an alternative technology that could make the driving experience even more fun. Barra vowing that GM would eliminate all gas engine vehicles by 2035 further politicized electric vehicles.
Farley and Barra’s execution serves as a textbook study in how not to introduce a virtuous product to the American public. They would have done well to study the playbook of the Quaker Oats Company.
In 1972, when launching Life cereal, the company faced a similar marketing hurdle: they had a product that was genuinely high in nutrition, but they knew that if they explicitly rammed that “healthy” messaging down consumers’ throats, kids would reject it outright as a joyless chore.
Instead of weaponizing the nutrition, they ran the legendary “Little Mikey” commercial. Two skeptical brothers push a bowl of the new cereal toward their notoriously picky little brother, expecting him to hate it. When he eagerly shovels it down, they famously scream, “He likes it! Hey Mikey!”
The ad closed with a brilliant, whisper-quiet voiceover instruction to parents: “When you bring Life home, don’t tell the kids it’s one of those nutritional cereals you’ve been trying to get them to eat. You’re the only one who has to know.”
Quaker Oats understood human psychology: sell the flavor, sell the visceral enjoyment, and let the underlying virtue be a quiet, rewarding bonus. Jim Farley did the exact opposite.
He took a 500-horsepower, torque-heavy, fundamentally fun-to-drive piece of automotive engineering and wrapped it in a heavy blanket of political virtue-signaling and regulatory mandate. By telling the public they had to eat their corporate green-energy vegetables rather than letting them discover a cool piece of technology, Ford took a machine that owners absolutely rave about and manufactured their own tragedy on dealers’ showroom floors.
Maybe that’s why I’m suddenly seeing Mach-Es everywhere in my neighborhood. If owners and reviewers are right, a lot of Los Angeles drivers have discovered they can buy one hell of a fun car at one heck of a price.