Ford is unleashing a substantial performance upgrade for Mach-E GT owners with their new performance upgrade that cuts 0-60 times from 3.8 seconds to just 3.3 seconds, a number that bests key competitors from Tesla and Porsche. We’ve seen this before from Tesla, who’s long offered a software performance upgrade option on their 3 and Y Long Range models. But for legacy automakers, this is new territory. To secure the speedier trap times, owners simply use the Ford Pass app to pay Ford about $1000. Voila, 100 lb-ft torque is unleashed and your GT’s neck-snapping acceleration is neck-snappier.
With the Mach-E, Ford has promised OTA updates from the outset. It has been a bumpy road, though, with a spotty customer experience. Random frequency, unintelligible version names, and delayed timelines have been hallmarks of Mach-E software updates. For example, Ford announced a major update to their BlueCruise ADAS system early last summer. According to owners on Mach-E Forum, that software upgrade finally started rolling out for some owners in June 2024, about a year after it was promised. And the rollout has been slow, with only certain cars and certain model years seeing the update thus far, months after some customers first reported receiving it. Furthermore, this updated, known as BlueCruise 1.3 – which features major improvements to availability, smoothness, reliability, and automatic lane-change capabilities – isn’t a single update, but arrives as a series of several packages over a week or more, increasing opportunity for glitches and delays.
Contrast that customer experience with Tesla’s well-regarded OTA experience, where rollouts happen across their fleet of millions of vehicles frequently and speedily. Sometimes the updates are more modest, and sometimes they include massive changes, including major updates to the interface, performance, and vehicle capabilities.
Despite perhaps not measuring up to Tesla’s software benchmarks, Ford is delivering huge value to their customers through OTAs to their EV models, and as a legacy automaker with less modern software and systems architecture, they’ve stuck with their commitment to delivering big updates and thus they have taken the leap into building Software Defined Vehicles, perhaps the auto industry’s most profound evolution ever, along with the move from ICE to battery propulsion.
As an owner of a non-GT Mach-E, I’m looking forward to seeing more and better updates to my vehicle experience, including – I hope – some performance or range improvements that I can unlock with the tap of a button and my credit card.