PotPourri Of Global Interest: Pictures of Mustang Boss 302

---by Independent Car Reviewer

My buddies (mostly my main man, Scott Monty) at Ford loaned me a Boss 302 for a week, and these are my pictures. I have to say that the Boss 302 generated more smiles, thumbs up, and conversations from onlookers than any car that I’ve test-driven, and I’ve test-driven some very exotic cars. The kind of onlookers that liked it make a difference too—they were working class, baby boomers, not venture capitalists and investment bankers. This makes the car even better, IMHO.

Before I drove the Boss 302, I wondered how different it could be from a Shelby GT500. The answer is that it’s very different: it doesn’t feel as brutish as the GT500 (550 horsepower compared to the Boss 302’s 444 horsepower)—not that there’s anything wrong with a brutish car unless you are a quiche eater. The price of the Boss 302 was approximately $43,000 (click here to see the sticker although there’s no price on it). In a sense, the car’s competition is a BMW M3 which comes in at approximately $59,000. I would argue that the Boss 302 is cheaper, cooler to the kind of people you’d want it to be cooler to, and more patriotic. Don’t get me wrong: it doesn’t have all the electronic gadgets of the BMW, but I’ve got plenty of gadgets in my house.

I have two teenage sons, and the thought of them driving my 444-horsepower car (think: 4.5 Priuses) gives me vertigo. But Ford has a clever gizmo called the MyKey which lets you program the top speed of the car into the key. That said, the Boss 302 comes with a TracKey. You pay the dealer to download software into the key which unleashes more fury like more cam timing and launch control (guess what that does). Imagine if you could take your Macintosh to an Apple store, and a genius could reprogram the MacKey to go faster for a slight charge! Where was I? Yeah, the TracKey is the anti-MyKey key. Love it.

Over the course of about 110 miles, mostly city, I got approximately 12 miles per gallon—not the greatest miles per gallon, but oh the smiles per gallon. I did a quick calculation: I drive 12,000 miles a year. That would be 1,000 gallons, assuming that I never go on the freeway and didn’t factor in air pollution. That’s $4,000 worth of gas. Let’s say I drove a car that got 24 miles per gallon. I’d buy 500 fewer gallons of gas and save $2,000 and pollute less. Although if I were going to buy a BMW M3, I would spend $16,000 less, and that would be four years of gas.

Honestly, with four kids and a 56.9 year-old body that has a hard time getting in and out of a low car, I doubt I’d buy a Boss 302 (or a BMW M3) in the near future. But still, driving the Boss 302 certainly made me fantasize…as the tshirt says, “Old guys rule.”