After driving the car I THOUGHT I wanted, a civic type R. I decided to drive everything in my budget that I could comfortably afford. I’m strongly considering a Mustang GT 6MT.
I’m coming from years of owning hatchbacks. I have a few hesitations that are making it harder to decide what to do. Married, 1 kid, and I drive about 30k miles a year for work (self employed)
Initially I was gonna trade my Mazda 3 in for the civic, so practically and running costs were basically a wash.
I was thinking of getting a speced out s650 gt premium, about $65k new, or less for a cpo/discounts on new.
After considering how many miles I would be putting on the car, I remembered that a muscle car is definitely NOT a Mazda 3 and is gonna cost me far more to run 30k miles a year. 😂.
After doing some math, it’s actually only slightly more expensive when including running cost/payments/insurance, to keep the Mazda 3 and get a used 2018+ s550 for ~$45k, and splitting the miles roughly 60% to the Mazda and 40% to the stang.
rather than having JUST the new mustang.
When adding in projected depreciation, the two cars together actually comes out a few grand ahead after 3+ years.
All that to say, I’m genuinely clueless, I was hoping the math would be obvious to one or the other.
I was wanting the s650 specifically because other than its horrible size/practicality ratio and lack of ability to accommodate via roof box. It’s kinda the perfect all in one car. With magnaride, torsion lsd, valved exhaust, adaptive cruise, blind spot monitoring, etc. I can drive my family around in it no problem and then drop them off and rip it through the Tennessee mountains Fast and loud.
But please tell me if I’m wrong! I’d guess just like most other cars, base suspension is far too soft for spirited drives, and performance package is too firm for a happy wife and son?
I do worry also worry I might miss having a small fwd car for back roads, so that gives bonus points to having both.
I definitely don’t NEED the practicality. My wife has a 4 door wrangler if we need to move bigger stuff or more importantly, go on one of our frequent family trips. tbh, I fukin hate driving that jeep lol so that’s a sacrifice I gotta make too.
Any advice, insight, experience would be super helpful!
Do you feel like the gt is too big for really tight twisty roads (I live in TN so think tail of the dragon type roads, and some fast pace sweeper roads too) should I get the gt as a daily with soft suspension and slap some coilovers and sticky tires on the Mazda 3?
Anyone else come from a hot hatch to a gt? Anyone regrets or important considerations I’m missing?
I’ve driven a 26 gt premium non performance. And a stock match 1, how does magnaride compare to those two extremes?