Mustang GT vs Nissan Z | Maximum Muscle, High Prices

Get ready for the ultimate test. The comparison between the brand new Mustang GT S650 with a performance pack and a manual transmission pitted against the brand new Nissan Z. The engineers will tell you these have been subtly updated but marketing will promise you they're brand new. So which is it? Stay tuned and find out. The brand new Nissan Z or is it? Well this is one of the best re-skinning jobs we've seen in modern history. Nissan did a great job on the exterior drawing levels of heritage from the previous generation cars and giving it a modern flair. When you look at a paint color like this where I physically had to buy shoes to match it because I wanted to be that guy. I wanted to impress a lot of men on the internet and I have done that. I'm here to tell you that this exterior design definitely looks like a muscle car, Japanese sports car and it is going to appeal to a lot of Nissan Z enthusiasts. They haven't deviated too much what they did in the history and we did a video on this talking with the designers and engineers and we know why they did it. A lot of this has to do with the fact they did not have an unlimited budget to make this a brand new car. So things like the door panels on the inside are largely carryover from the previous car. They've improved some materials but they've spent most of the design budget on the inside and giving you infotainment and an updated gauge cluster. They still wanted to make this feel old school which it does. Everything's physical even from the on-off traction control. You don't have to sit here and hold it for 20 minutes and go through 20 different drive modes to make it work. It's very simple, non-frustrating to use and the technology implementation in here is not gimmicky at all. You're literally switching in a sport gauge cluster mode. You see your temperatures, you see all that. The infotainment is just there to listen to music and you can even turn off the screen. It's not a primary point of this interior space and I think the car's better for it. Yes, it feels old but in the modern age of cars it's functional, it's purposeful, the visibility is pretty decent in here and it doesn't feel like a coffin. Something like the new Toyota Supra feels like. So they've tried to find a balance of usability including the which overall is pretty usable but again this is a two-seater sports car. It's not going to be an everyday vehicle so if you're looking for that car that's not this and you might have to consider the Mustang. All the input points are great. The shifter still has a solid feel to it. The pedal box is skewed more towards smaller feet. Not as great as the Mustang if you're a bigger person but it feels like a sports car interior and that's the biggest takeaway. But let's head into the Mustang and talk about the pros and cons of that. The interior of the brand new S650 Mustang. That's right, this is all new. Well, kind of. The big thing that Ford wanted to do and you saw this in our development video for the Dark Horse is they wanted to appeal to a younger generation. Get rid of some of that heritage which meant putting a threaded screen in here and a threaded screen that is tilted towards the driver. It's supposed to make you feel more connected to the experience. That means moving HVAC controls into touch. It means giving you Unreal Engine software optimization using a GPU to real-time render a bunch of animations to make you feel like you're in the next generation car. And that's because the kids these days they love their video game systems and they want people to feel like they're playing a video gamer on their phone. Hey guys, it's Jack. Sorry to interrupt this idiot. Mr. Hotshot has no idea that the future is tech. Video game systems are driving massive innovation and zoomers want things they remember from childhood like phones and games. Let's be real for a minute shall we? The studies show us the average 24 year old is chomping at the bit to buy a $62,000 car loaded to the gills with real-time rendered screens and animations. These innovators want to drive a manual transmission Mustang to their favorite street, to their favorite store. It feels very generic. That's the problem when you go to a threaded screen. Hyundai and Kia do it. Mercedes does it. BMW does it. Basically everybody does it and there's no differentiation here besides software experience. And to Jack's point, in the drive mode selection you can't decouple or individualize what you want to do. So as you go past sport you can't change throttle linearity and damper mode settings. They're tied into the more aggressive settings. So there's still work to do here in terms of customization but overall they've done a pretty noble job first attempt. All the other parts of this car are largely carryover. Despite them changing materials and trying to make it feel better than it is, you can tell they didn't have a huge budget to redo this entire car. They said it right up front. So the storage is largely carryover and the doors, the center armrest, the cupholders, the trunk space, even the seats feel carryover aside from maybe a little bit of material design. The steering wheel has been updated. It feels way more sports car. It feels less generic and a lot of the some of the switch gear in here feels less generic than the previous Mustang. And they've opted to give you a more traditional parking brake. Unlike the Z however that has a parking brake with a cable this is a digital pull handle. It does have a drift brake that has software calibration to work with the ABS to give you that hydraulic drift brake feel. So there is some attempt at making this a little bit different than the competition but things that the Mustang's always done well is it's designed for a bigger person. So like even the pedal box operates well for heel to toe. If you have a huge shoe like Jack he wears a size 17. The guy is huge everywhere. The shifter feels much improved in terms of shifter design, the shift knob and including the titanium knob and the dark horse. All the physical can mechanical connections to you in the driving machine are really good. It's just a matter of can you stomach some of the technology in here. But let's head into the shop we're going to talk about some of the engineering. We're under two cars that have been re-skinned and marketed as they're heavily updated. So we're gonna at least it's a fair comparison honestly between the Nissan Z and the new Mustang. Well the Z is almost old enough to drink underneath it. First that platform and its first iteration was debuted in 2003. Wow. The 350Z and then it was heavily updated going into the 370 and of course for the current Z which many people call the 400Z but Nissan just calls the Z. It has been heavily refreshed and we have a documentary style film where you get to hear from the designers and engineers and we've put it in a comparison test with the Supra. So we're going to very very briefly walk you through the Z performance pack before we talk about this new 2024 Mustang GT. It's double wishbone front and rear. It has a limited slip differential. It has a twin turbo V6 engine and here's a dyno plot from when we dynoed the last one. It makes pretty good power. It puts its power through either a six-speed manual or a nine-speed automatic which is a Jatco Mercedes co-developed automatic gearbox which honestly isn't that great but the big thing is the platform right. It's double wishbone. That's something that at least from a geometry perspective this Mustang doesn't have. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Yeah the Z has been improved in several ways. It's mostly cooling. They've had to make major revisions to the cooling strategy because it makes so much power compared to the turbo so they've changed the front end quite a bit. They've made some revisions to the manual transmission where they moved the slave cylinder to an accessible spot where you can easily remove it. There's little tweaks that they made here there to the geometry of the suspension damping of course damping and spring rates but overall to your point yes it's largely a carryover car with manufacturing improvements and improvements that they've learned on how to make it better and just left everything else to the aftermarket which brings us to the brand new or not so brand new Mustang Jack. Yeah so as we talked about in our Dark Horse piece and if you want to learn everything there is to learn about this car I suggest you watch that video you'll hear directly from one of the B-dyne engineers, interior exterior designers and a lot of the senior leadership. But what do you need to know? Let's start with the 5.0L Coyote. This is their latest revision of the 5.0L Coyote. The big thing from a mechanical perspective is this now needed to make the latest emissions rules but it gave them an excuse to open up the engine. So the left hand header has been radically basically redesigned to allow it to flow better you have new exhaust cams you have a new oil pan for better windage you get the dual throttle bodies and overall more engine output. Here's a quick clip of it getting dynoed by a very kind local shop which we'll be doing some more work with in the future but it's stated horsepower is 486 with the active exhaust gets a six-speed manual gearbox in the regular GT it is a Getrag MT82 this is a gearbox that gets a lot of flack I will tell you it's a little bit overblown from a suspension geometry perspective you get aluminum in the lower control arms the geometry as the engineer talked about has been slightly improved and revised. The big big change is the MR damper strategy if you option in the optional magnetic that's cool somebody forgot to tighten that uh tie rod and nut jam nut jack how's that alignment been treating you it's been good so far uh oh great tighten those down don't worry about that all right back to the engineering changes so what about the steering I know Ford has claimed they made some pretty big changes here or subtle changes yeah so the steering ratio is a little bit faster than it used to be the big change is the e-pass rack itself they've pulled out some what's called NVH material out of and they've made it more rigid the idea is to make the front end more direct and better steering feel I think the big letdown from the steering as we're going to talk about in the drive segment is the actual tires themselves these P0 Pirelli tires aren't the best and when you compare this to the Dark Horse which has the identical steering rack I think the changes in geometry in the tires do lend to a somewhat vague feeling front end however I did drive a bullet back to back with this and in comparison to that car the steering is tighter and a little bit more natural in this car than it was in the prior gen s550 but it's not a huge night and day difference and you do have to drive them back to back what about MagneRide calibration the MR dampers are noticeably better in this car I think while the hardware is largely carryover obviously it's still strut in the front multi-link in the rear and the MR dampers are optional on these cars but the ability for them to react front and rear they allow the front and the back of this car to feel a bit more connected this is still a GT or a let's call it a highway do everything vehicle it's not a track car so it is a little bit floaty but the the connection to the front and the rear is better and obviously there are slight aero changes underneath which we've talked about in the Dark Horse video like these canards this car is just a let's call it a variation on a theme it is subtle improvements to an architecture they've already spent a lot of time on some of the deficiencies with the Mustang are still here it's still a heavy car yeah this thing's almost 4,000 pounds and in this era while you could argue that is very very heavy sadly again as they know internally all their competition is gone yeah right if you want a 2 plus 2 manual v8 rural drive car this is sort of the only two-door game in town and that's that's the sad truth about all this and you can tell like you know if you're on the design side like you have x amount of budget to work with where do you make the subtle improvements that aren't going to cost a lot of money like you know the under tray the spats to kind of reduce the pressure and reduce the lift on the front end i mean there's little things they do but then you look at the rest of the car much like the z the z is the same thing half of the under underbelly is uncovered which is great in terms of service but you know the aerodynamics aren't there compared to modern cars you're still dealing to your point with the weight so this is always going to be fighting itself despite all that advanced suspension technology with mr dampers it can only do so much but again there's nothing else doing this and that becomes the excuse for it much like the z they're they're trying to do unique things and i don't know so mark let's go take both of these cars for a quick street drive sounds good we're in the takumi crafted mustang for once mark and you're driving you're a big proponent of this car tell me why you like it more than the mustang i'll tell you why ready i'm ready oh it's a dance partner jack one of the things i love about the rogue is it's it has the soft compliant ride with the rope i mean the z it this car when you drive it on the street it feels like somebody purposely set it up to be like a 90s car it has 90s car like ride control body control motion forward and aft you know why it feels like a 90s car though right yeah tell me this car to me as a street car feels far more connected than the mustang it is an older car and i think that's part of the the charm of it of course it feels smaller it feels lighter it feels more nimble and it's a stone's throw away from being a far more capable car with aftermarket work on the suspension and tires as soon as you get a real alignment in here because double wish bone you get a good set of shocks decent set of brake pads and tires it's going to go from kind of that boaty old school feeling car to something far more sharp and edgy and i'm mixed because one of the things i like about this is it's just so casual to drive it and the gearbox feels pretty good the the overall handling is decent it's definitely skewed towards always going sideways namely with these pretty nerf tires on here there's it's like the the twice as expensive gt86 or gr86 right like it's got more power it still has that wantingness to always go sideways on you and i think that's what's fun about it feels like a very purposeful car in its simplistic simplicity in terms of inputs interior there's almost no gimmicks and yes to your point it's because it's it's freaking ancient you know they didn't have a lot of money to work with here and doing 25 screens and a whole bunch of drive mode bullshit that's what i like about it yeah it's a gimmickless car and i know you're about to hit me when we get in the mustang about the unreal engine and all other fun stuff but at its core and when i first drove this in tennessee when we did our original video the things i appreciate about this car is that you can get the front end to up because it's double wishbone the rear rotates fairly naturally though there's some pretty bad secondary motions because it's so soft in the back end i think the part that kills me though about this car and we talked about it in our original z supra video is that it's it's like it should be really capable and even on sticky tires it's not the fact that this an re71 rs is the laps are done on different days is slower than a civic type r on just potenza sports is disappointing and that part of me even though i don't care about lap times does eat away at me but i guess mark it's time for us to drive a real car with a v8 before we do that oh yeah tell me i just i do think that they they went far too conservative with the setup of this car out of the box it's it's going it's definitely great on the street but it's the softness and suspension the compliance the ease to drive it every day is also what it hurts hurts it in its outright performance and at 60 000 when you have a four popper honda front wheel drive car that's faster than this and feels more direct and not saying that it's a better car but i think they definitely went the the wrong way for a car like this and i don't know how they're going to correct it the nismo is not a correction of this but um again it's left to the aftermarket but i can't wait to hear you tell me all about the mustang and how dearborn has fixed the japanese muscle car formula jack well dude with all my unreal engine animations i will show you what a real performance car can do i'm back in my 50 i have my fox body gauges i've turned everything up why was your burnout better than mine v8 mark that's why feels like i'm on a a big lake in a big boat yeah compared to the z units we're driving these cars back to back and we will be doing a track comparison in the future with the nismo on the dark horse the gt and the regular z are street cars according to both the oems is the way the front ends work on these cars you talked to me off camera about it and i agree the initial turn-in in the mustang is nowhere as sharp as the z is but the mid-corner stability in the corner exit is much better yeah this car in i think it all boils down to one thing damper technology where this car really starts to set and become more balanced it's just a byproduct of having better damper technology but in the slow stuff there's absolutely no comparison you cannot get over the weight of this car how soft it is how much you have to deal with the weight and the strut suspension in the front of the mustang is it's funny because both of these cars are really trying different things but the end result is so similar in driving character they're both really compliant for the road they're both really soft on the road they're just going about it in two different ways one of the questions i had and one of the things people brought up is the steering of these cars this and the dark horse which we drove in a different video had the same steering rack and i think compared to the old gt it's a little bit better and i did drive a bullet back to back with this the problem this has versus the dark horse is it doesn't have as aggressive as alignment and the tires i really do think this car is let down by the less sticky sort of like yeah grand touring max summer tires that are on it it just doesn't have the directness of the front end it doesn't weight up anywhere as well no it's for for sure that the the tires are a huge factor in this you have far less grip to work with the sidewall has more flex in it and the damper profiling is softer on this car than the dark horse and you know when you're dealing with a less aggressive lineman you just have you don't have as sharp of a front end and it feels like there is 16 layers of foam between you and the front end of this car in slower speed maneuvers but i think compared to the z because the dampers are far more sophisticated and better calibrated we're in sport so it finds this reasonable balance i can put it in a track they'll firm up even more and then in normal it's a completely fat dog yeah a really really soft car i think when you want at least in higher like twisty corners when you load up the suspension i think it has a little less secondary motion yeah than the z has and the other thing that i really like about this car we talked about in the prior generation mustang is the brakes the brakes these big brembos in the front have good feel and so much overhead where the nissan doesn't have that and the big thing that i love about this car is the five liter i think it's one of the best feeling non-special exotic engines you can buy it revs it's not the most musical thing in the world it's not all that refined but it has so much charisma yeah it does and while you know when you drive these back-to-back you realize this only is about maybe 10 faster than the z which is incredible given the displacement of this engine the horsepower disparity it's it's the weight but you know it wins purely on the musicality of it the fact that it's naturally aspirated it has the character that the z doesn't have but where the z really sells me over this is its size you don't have to manage the weight and the fact that the front and the rear end feel like they're screwed together in that car the transition between the body motions between the front and the rear are minimized compared to this where you constantly feel like you're you know we have to purposely set up every corner for okay i have to brake i have to wait for the body to set you're constantly dealing with that with the mustang because of its size the z does not have that and it's a better car more of a driver's tool compared to this yet it's still soft like it still gets to the same place of being that comfortable street car without having to deal with all this floppiness that the mustang is and has become yeah i think they are very similar cars in their spirit and their overall attitude right they're both cars that you could use every single day the advantage that the gt has over the z is it really can be your only car yeah the the difference is i think the z is a smaller more nimble feeling vehicle but the gt has that five liter like charisma i think the gearbox is marginally better and i think it's a car that if you are going to drive flat out on a racetrack is going to outperform the z just because of the sophistication of the dampers yeah the extra power the better brakes i just also feel like the platform itself because it's only 10 years old versus almost 21 years old feels a little bit more i don't rigid it feels like it has higher high speed stability than the z has the mustang gt at this level is just a set of tires short of being a really really capable car and with the z being almost the same price it's a set of tires brake pads dampers probably a few other little tweaks here and there so comparable that way i think the mustang is kind of the better car as much as i don't particularly like the weight and the size of it it to me i would i would take the nissan z but i'd also have to stomach the fact that it needs a whole lot of work to get back to that tight like less floaty feeling car whereas the mustang and its damper technology and everything they've thrown at it is just pretty much ready to go out of the box at 60 grand which is what you want you know i can do this too while i'm swiping the screen i feel way more connected every time i'm spinning the car around while you're doing but i can change my drive modes to show my unreal technology i can't stop looking at the animations jack that's why i hit people in this car all right with that said jack let's head over to our next cars and coffee we got people stop oh man oh just just show me the rear three-quarter can we park and just go through the animations of course i'm going to spend an hour looking final thoughts on the nissan z versus ford mustang gt let's say this first huge thanks to ben and james at ultima raceworks it's a performance shop here in crystal lake and they were kind enough to let us dino the mustang gt no so huge thanks to our ford rep sam and our nissan rep josh so what about the cars well let's first talk about price the nissan as tested in this video was like 53 54 000 and the mustang was over 60 grand and at the risk of sounding like an old man when i bought my s550 premium performance pack gt with rebates i paid 34 000 now look when you're spending over 50 000 or well over 50 000 you should have very high expectations that leads us into the and sadly after wrestling with mark we both agreed that the nissan z came in second place let's talk about what's good about the car first it feels much much smaller to drive because it is it's got a shorter wheelbase it weighs less and it gets into corners much better than the mustang it's largely due to it being double wishbone the con of the car is it has some high speed instability it deals with weird secondary body motions that's because the car from a suspension tuning perspective is deeply compromised it's way too soft and the dampers are nowhere as sophisticated as what you find in the mustang the engine the forced induction v6 is far less charismatic than the v8 found on the mustang and the interior space while there's a lot less bullshit associated with gimmicks it doesn't feel like a 53 54 000 car the mustang comes in first place and a lot of that's due to the five liter v8 we dino'd it in this video it sounds good it feels special and brings a lot of charisma to the table the car is more usable well yes there's some gimmicky stuff with the interior and you can argue it's less usable than it used to be at least when it comes to not having physical hvac the car for the most part is a vehicle you can use every single day it has higher overhead higher high speed stability it's a better all-around vehicle and of course well it's a mustang so that huge thanks to everybody for watching i hope to see you soon