Electric Shelby Mustang Mach-E upgrade revealed starting under $30K, but there’s a caveat
Shelby America introduced its first production EV, the Shelby Mustang Mach-E GT, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of founder Carrol Shelby’s birth. However, the electric Shelby Mustang will only be available in Europe, and there will be extremely limited availability.
The history behind the Shelby Mustang
Founded in 1962 by former race car driver Carrol Shelby, Shelby America is best known for manufacturing and marketing performance vehicles and related parts.
After driving Ferrari and Maserati sports racing cars for several years, Shelby was invited to join Aston Martin, where he hit the peak of his career, winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1959. However, a heart condition forced him to retire from racing a year later.
Although Shelby was impressed with the speed of the Ferrari, Maserati, and Jaguars, he was not amused with constantly repairing and maintaining them.
This led him to the idea of building a sports car and selling it for half the price of his competitors, coming up with the name “Cobra.”
Shelby contacted Chevrolet to source engines for the vehicle, but they turned him down as they didn’t want another Corvette competitor. So, he proposed the idea to Ford, and the company was intrigued by the thought of offering a sports car to compete with Chevy’s Corvette.
The Cobra dominated the Corvette in North America, winning from the east coast to the west coast. And in 1965, the Shelby Cobra beat Ferrari to win the World’s Manufacturers GT Championship, marking the only time an American vehicle manufacturer won the championship.
And as they say, the rest is history. Shelby is making another historic moment in its rich performance history by introducing its first performance electric car, a moment its founder long looked forward to.
Meet the electric Shelby Mustang Mach-E GT
Shelby editions of the Mustang have been around nearly as long as the legendary muscle car itself. The new performance EV will be based on the Ford Mustang Mach-E GT, with the Shelby package modifying the electric AWD vehicle to enhance handling and style.
The Shelby team has also reduced its weight, made the ride smoother, and tailored its style to improve performance. The company’s VP of operations, Vince LaViolette, explains:
This is our first foray into a production electric vehicle, so we spent a great deal of time testing EV’s on the track to understand their unique handling dynamics. Based on that experience, we lowered the SUV over an inch, cut weight off the top of it, reduced rotating mass to enhance stability and enhanced the aerodynamics.
After introducing a concept based on the electric Ford Mustang Mach-E in 2021, Gary Patterson of Shelby American said “The reaction was very positive,” leading the automaker to develop its first production version.
Although specifics on performance were not given, Shelby did provide several features you can expect to see included in the Shelby Mustang Mach-E GT, such as:
- Carbon fiber hood
- Carbon fiber grille
- Carbon fiber front splitter
- Carbon fiber mirror caps
- Carbon fiber lower for trim
- Over-the-top vinyl stripping
- “Shelby” side running vinyl stripping
- Custom Shelby floor mats
- “Shelby” rear deck badging
- Performance lowering springs
- Shelby forged aluminum wheels
- BORLA Active Performance Sound System
However, Shelby’s electric Mustang will only be available in Europe, with 100 packages being offered. They will be available to retrofit any privately-owned 2021-2023 model year Mustang Mach-E GT or can be added to a new vehicle by a Shelby American dealer.
Shelby American says the price for the electric performance Mustang will start at €24,900 (roughly $27,500), with production beginning in July. Ford Mach-E GT owners can contact Shelby Europe for more info.
As for why its Shelby Mustang Mach-E is only being offered in Europe, Aaron Shelby, board member of Carrol Shelby International and grandson to the company’s founder, responded:
We elected to initially offer the Shelby Mustang Mach-E GT only in Europe because sales of EV’s are growing much more rapidly there than in the USA.
He also noted the number of public charging stations has increased by 431% from 2016 to 2021, saying, “It just makes good business sense for Shelby American.”
Perhaps, with the number of EV chargers expected to rise rapidly across North America over the next several years due to the $7.5 billion in funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Shelby may bring the electric performance Mach-E to the US.
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Elon wants the US military to start buying Tesla Cybertrucks – and now they are! The Air Force has ordered two Cybertruck testers for target practice to determine how easy they are to blow up, while Jo makes up a whole new conspiracy theory on today’s explosive episode of Quick Charge!
Today’s episode is brought to you by retrospec—makers of sleek, powerful e-bikes and outdoor gear built for everyday adventure. Electrek listeners can get 10% off their next ride until August 14 with the exclusive code ELECTREK10 only at retrospec.com.
An it doesn’t stop there. We’ve also got exciting new home battery backup and V2X options for Tesla owners, and one Texas EV driver that decided to conquer the Texas floodwaters by harnessing the awesome combined powers of electrons and stupidity (it’s pretty awesome).
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Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer project is reportedly over. Bloomberg reports that CEO Elon Musk is killing the project after a mass exodus of talent from the Dojo team to a competing startup.
Dojo was the name of Tesla’s in-house AI chip development to create supercomputers to train its AI models for self-driving.
Tesla hired a bunch of top chip architects and tried to develop better AI accelerator chips to rely less on companies like NVIDIA, AMD, and others.
It has been running into delays for years.
We previously reported on significant setbacks. In 2018, Jim Keller, the famed chip architect who was first hired to lead Tesla’s chip-making effort, left the company.
Ganesh Venkataramanan succeeded him, but he left Tesla in 2023.
For the last few years, Peter Bannon, who worked with Keller for years, has been leading Tesla’s chip-making programs, but he is now reportedly also leaving the automaker.
Bloomberg reports that Musk has “ordered the effort to be shut down.”:
Peter Bannon, who was heading up Dojo, is leaving and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has ordered the effort to be shut down, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. The team has lost about 20 workers recently to newly formed DensityAI, and remaining Dojo workers are being reassigned to other data center and compute projects within Tesla, the people said.
DensityAI is a new startup currently in stealth mode, founded by several former Tesla employees, including Venkataramanan.
It reportedly plans to build chips for AI data centers and robots, much like the Dojo program.
The company recently hired 20 former Tesla employees who worked on Dojo.
While the program appeared to be lagging behind for years as Tesla increasingly bought more compute power from NVIDIA, Musk has been claiming progress.
The CEO said in June:
Tesla Dojo AI training computer making progress. We start bringing Dojo 2 online later this year. It takes three major iterations for a new technology to be great. Dojo 2 is good, but Dojo 3 will be great.
During Tesla’s quarterly conference call in late July, the CEO claimed that Dojo 2 will be “operating at scale sometime next year.”
Electrek’s Take
It’s unclear whether the report is accurate or if it’s an extrapolation from the talent exodus to Elon killing Dojo, or if Elon was lying just a few weeks ago.
Alternatively, this development may be so recent that Elon went from being confident in Dojo a few weeks ago to disbanding the team working on it now.
Either way, I think it’s clear that the project has been lagging, and Tesla has been extremely dependent on chip suppliers rather than making its own.
I think Dojo being likely dead is not a big loss for Tesla.
When it comes to chip making, developing its own inference compute for onboard “AI computers” was always the more important project.
TSMC is set to produce Tesla’s new AI5 chip, which is coming soon, and we have recently learned that Samsung will be manufacturing its AI6 chip.
I think the bigger concern from this report is that it’s the latest example of an ongoing exodus of talent at Tesla.
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Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Twitter Inc. and Square Inc., listens during the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Florida, on Friday, June 4, 2021.
Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Block shares jumped in extended trading on Thursday after the fintech company increased its forecast for the year.
Here is how the company did, compared to analysts’ consensus estimates from LSEG.
- Earnings per share: 62 cents adjusted vs. 69 cents expected
Block doesn’t report a revenue figure, but said gross profit rose 14% from a year earlier to $2.54 billion, beating analysts’ estimates of $2.46 billion for the quarter. Gross payment volume increased 10% to $64.25 billion.
Block raised its guidance for full-year gross profit to $10.17 billion, representing 14% growth from a year earlier. In its prior earnings report, Block said gross profit for the year would come in at $9.96 billion.
The company expects full-year adjusted operating income of $2.03 billion, or a 20% margin. For the third quarter, the company expects gross profit to grow 16% from a year ago to $2.6 billion, with an operating margin of 18%.
Square payment volume in the quarter grew 10% from a year earlier.
Block faces growing competition from rivals such as Toast and Fiserv‘s Clover, though its Square business still gained share during the quarter in areas such as retail and food and beverage.
Block shares were down 10% this year as of Thursday’s close, while the Nasdaq is up 10%. Last month, Block was added to the S&P 500.
— CNBC’s Robert Hum contributed to this report.
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