The 2011 Ford Mustang was well-received by both critics and fans after it got two new engines and a host of tech upgrades. Now that these cars have been on the road for a few months though, problems have started to surface. Serious problems. The first issue had to do with the Chinese-made manual transmissions that warranted an NHTSA investigation and response from Ford. Are V6 Mustang driveshafts the next area of concern?
Judging from two recent videos of V6 Mustangs blowing their driveshafts under WOT, we say there might be a serious issue here.
All 2011+ Mustangs make use of a two-piece, heavy-as-hell driveshaft, though we believe the V6 driveshafts are different from the GT/Shelby driveshafts. The first video (posted up top), found by Autoblog, shows some idiot videotaping himself going in excess of 135 mph on a public road, while filming his speed. It’s a stupid, childish thing to do, to be sure. Then, right towards the end of the video, you start to hear a rattling, followed by a horrifying sound from underneath the car.
That friends, was the sound of driveshaft failure. It’s also important to note that, from the factory, V6 Mustangs are limited to 112 MPH via an electronic governor. But removing that limited is just an ECU flash away, and many shops can remove the limiter in a matter of minutes.
Isolated incident from an idiot driver, right? Well, we did some digging around the Internet and found, much to our chagrin, that other Mustang V6 owners have had very similar issues. Take this video, of a V6 Mustang with a six-speed manual transmission doing a dyno run. According to this All Ford Mustangs thread, the only modification was an exhaust system plus a tune, and at approximately 135 mph, the driveshaft broke. The comments on the video indicate that a replacement driveshaft also failed after less than a month. There are also other threads were people that have completely stock V6 Mustangs that claim they don’t race at all have had multiple failures under normal speeds.
It’s a puzzling question, and we don’t want to jump to any conclusions here. However, we do find it odd that, while Ford opted to give both the V6 and Mustang GT’s the same rear end and transmission…they did not give them the same driveshafts. Perhaps because they wanted to reach that magic 31 mpg mark in the V6 cars. Perhaps it was a cost cutting measure. The most obvious answer is that these Mustang owners were pushing their cars past the factory limits. Then again, it is a Mustang…so shouldn’t Ford have expected this?
None of those answers really satisfy us, and it will be interesting to see how this all unfolds in the coming months.