Rental Review: 2022 Shelby Mustang GT-H For Hertz
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Housekeeping: A few ACF readers have requested that I do the occasional car review; I’m not on a press-car rotation but I’ll do what I can. Format will basically be the boring old review format I developed at my last gig.
Has it really been just over nine whole years since I ran the Hertz Penske Mustang at MSR Houston, abusing all consumable portions of the car to a fare-thee-well while poking the most gentle fun possible at Road&Track perennial Zach Bowman? Wow. Time flies when you’re having fun and/or surgery. As I recall, I used the car to coach both Derek Kreindler and talented malcontent Philip Thomas for a few laps each in addition to harassing Lemons practice traffic until I entirely wore out my welcome.
I got no racetrack time in this new-for-2022 Shelby GT-H, unfortunately; my time with the car was limited to just 227 miles in and around Los Angeles. The occasion: a birthday trip with my pals Sammy and Rodney. Various aspects of the aforementioned trip, in which Rodney personally assaulted both a Detroit Airport tram and a food-delivery robot on Sunset Boulevard like John Connor from a Terminator future in which John Connor just happens to be a 57-year-old Black man who also had sex with three different 200-pound Waffle House waitresses over the course of five months, will be discussed in a subscribers-only post tomorrow. You won’t want to miss it.
Ford and Hertz have returned to the rent-a-racer well a few times in the past fifteen years. This time you have your choice of a slightly breathed-on Mustang GT convertible or a “900-horsepower” variant of the GT500 with a different supercharger and other super-fancy details.
Only one of these is $99 a day with unlimited mileage, and it’s not the one with a claimed 900 horsepower.
For that relatively modest sum, you get a Mustang GT with at least the following extras:
a semi-padded rollbar
a Borla cat-back exhaust
a “deep-draw hood”
an aggressive front splitter-ish thing and rear wing-ish thing
stripes and stitching
20-inch wheels with all-season tires
mandatory 10-speed automatic transmission with shifter paddles
Not a lot of changes — but the current Mustang GT is an utterly brilliant car that doesn’t need a lot of changes, so that’s fine. If you think you might be in the market for a ‘Stang some day, this GT-H is a cheap way to see if such a thing could be right for you.
The looks are an acquired taste in your humble author’s opinion, but they got a thumbs-up from Brock Foose, the talented son of Chip Foose, during a brief conversation at the Huntington Beach shop belonging to the Foose family. Brock, who daily-drives a current-generation Mustang with just a few touch-ups, thought the “deep-draw” hood in particular was a big visual win. It certainly gives the car character, but in actual driving it obscures a surprisingly significant amount of the road ahead, rising and falling as you apply and relax the throttle.
All the interior changes are cosmetic and they shouldn’t make a big difference to a purchase decision. The seats are mid-tier GT stuff, not the extra-cost Recaros of a true-blood GT500. Ford’s decision to give the front driver’s seat a power easy-entry feature is great if there’s no one behind you in the severely compromised rear seats. “Not as bad as a 944,” Sammy notes, which is about the nicest thing one could say.
(Sidebar: The phenomenon of four-place convertibles that significantly compromise the rear seats has always bewildered me. Why get a four-seater when there are perfectly good two-seat convertibles out there? That’s correct: so you can put people in the back seats. Laugh all you want about the rental Sebring convertibles of years past, but Chrysler got that part right. People want to sit in the back seats of convertibles. They are meant to be social vehicles.)
So much has been written about the outgoing Camaro’s visibility problems that one tends to assume the cross-town Ford competitor has no such problems, which isn’t true, particularly when said Mustang is a convertible. The power top creates significant blind spots, as do the massive A-pillars. It’s not as bad as a Camaro, but it’s not good. If you’ve been raised on Hondas or BMWs, the size and turret-top cockpit will be an unpleasant surprise. The rollbar does not make matters any worse, but if you have a six-footer in the back seats, he’s not going to get a lot of protection from it.
“If you roll this car,” Sammy yelled over a hurricane’s worth of top-down wind noise as I nonchalantly popped across five lanes to get into the carpool slot at a robust rate of speed, “my head is going to get shaved off down to the brain pan.” Sounds like a Sammy problem to me.
You won’t be surprised to hear that a 4000-pound Mustang on 20-inch wheels does not ride well, but the GT-H suspension appears determined to provide the worst of all possible worlds. There’s a lot of pitch and roll, with an astoundingly lax attitude to body control, but there’s also a real shortage of bump absorption. One particularly bad dip on the 405 put the GT-H in a takeoff-ready posture with zero weight on the front wheels long enough for me to say “whoa” like Keanu. Admittedly I was hauling the proverbial mail at the time.
Which is easy to do with this powertrain. Shifting the 10-speed automatic with the paddles is a hilarious and stupid exercise in raw frustration; the delay between request and fulfilment is enough to make a FedEx Ground driver sit up and take notice. Best to just let it do its own thing and shift according to its own desires, which are usually spot-on. You’ll never be short of power, even in a state where Teslas are omnipresent.
The current Coyote-engined Mustang is going to be one of those cars that grandchildren of the future can’t believe their grandparents didn’t buy when they had the chance. “You mean you had $55,000 to spend and you got… a GMC Acadia? Instead of a 450-horsepower V-8 that revs to 7500 easy as pie? Were you using a lot of ketamine at the time, Papaw?” Unfortunately, the Mustang is just annoying enough in daily use to raise questions.
These questions are exacerbated by the Shelby’s scrape-prone nose and zero-chill Borla exhaust. Honestly, it’s exactly what you want for a three-day Los Angeles trip, where the constant NASCAR burble feels like a super-fun lark. If you drove the GT-H every day, however, you’d stick bananas in at least two of the four tailpipes. It is loud. Louder than the boomin’ subwoofer stereo, louder than the exotic cars around you, louder than the homeless person screaming on La Brea. Never quiet. Not on the freeway, not at idle, not in 10th gear at 48mph. It is loud as hell.
This is arguably the most successful GT-H since the original one because it is exactly what renters want: it’s a show-off car where all the extra excitement is skin deep. Expect it to fetch better money than the 2006 and 2016 editions, neither of which are exactly bargains. Serious Mustang buyers should look at a Mach 1 or one of the Performance Package cars. This is just plain fun, nothing more.
I’ll leave the last word to Rodney, who saw the GT-H in the LAX parking lot and yelled “NO FUCKIN’ WAY! WE HAVE TO GET THAT CAR!” I’ve known the man since 1995, so I’d already signed the rental contract. I paid 379.48 to drive the car from Sunday afternoon to Wednesday morning. Worth every penny, particularly if you’d like to get your front-wheel-drive feet in the ponycar pool for a brief moment.
2022 Shelby GT-H: $99/day plus taxes
Highs: Looks the business, not much worse than a regular Mustang GT in everyday operation, exhaust is great in small doses…
Lows: …but murder on long drives. Back seat is a penalty box for adults. Needs better suspension damping. It’s a shame not to get a V-8 Mustang with a stick shift if you have the choice.
Sum-Up: Probably the best rental Mustang in a long time. Gets almost as many looks as a rental Huracan for a fraction of the money. Try it before you buy a Mach 1.
I’d buy a mustang if I wasn’t pretentious. If Lincoln or Aston Martin would rebadge one and charge 2x, I’m in.
"Why get a four-seater when there are perfectly good two-seat convertibles out there? That’s correct: so you can put people in the back seats."
Yep. Especially small people. My boys are young enough to love riding with the top down even if there is a hurricane in their faces at 35 mph. Two-seaters were off the menu in the shopping process that led to my convertible purchase.
On this Mustang, maybe it marks me as a boring old fart, but I literally cannot see a single way in which I would like this car better than a dead-standard GT vert. And the latter is available with three pedals.