Remember a couple of weeks ago when we showed you that spy video of a heavily modified Ford Mach-E adrift like crazy on a North Carolina test track? We speculate that it might have been some kind of joint project with Ford and Ford Tuning Company RTR, and that’s exactly what it is. This is the Ford Mustang Mach-E 1400, a seven-engine prototype that generates a total of 1,400 horsepower, which I assume is suitable for most uses.
If that lot of electric horsepower is familiar, it’s because 1,400 hp of an all-electric transmission is the same as Ford’s all-electric Mustang-based drag car, the Mustang Cobra Jet 1400, made.
The Mach-e 1400 is a much more flexible type of vehicle as it is designed for more than just dragging strip usage: Ford press release says
“… this unique Mustang Mach-E with its seven electric motors and high downforce is ready for the track, the drag track or the gymkhana course, anywhere where you can show how the electric drive promises extreme performance from the Mustang. “
Ford also made a fun little video showing the Mach-e 1400 and a bunch of its other special racing projects in action:
The video shows a large iPad-style screen that controls car functions, including “Unchained” mode.
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The design of the Mach-e 1400’s transmission is, as you can imagine with any seven-engine setup, quite complicated. Ford describes it like this:
“The Mustang Mach-E 1400 has seven engines, five more than even the Mustang Mach-E GT. Three are attached to the front differential and four to the rear in pancake style, with a single drive shaft connecting them to the differentials, which have a wide adjustment range to set the car up for everything from drift to high-speed racing . . “
When they say “pancake style” that means more or less what you’re imagining in your head, because the Yasa P400 electric motors used, each of which produces up to 214 HP and 273 pound-feet of torque, look like this:
That’s almost as pancakey as an electric motor is likely to have.
So a stack of three of these connected in advance to a differential, and then a stack of four of these connected to a differential at the rear. The stacks are with vertical motors (not how pancakes are eaten, normally, more like books on a shelf) and appear to be in the center tunnel area, inside the axles.
The engines run on a 56.8 kWh nickel, manganese and cobalt battery pack, with a non-conductive dielectric cooling system to allow cooling during charging and to keep charging times as short as possible.
Transmission options are quite significant, as the press release describes:
The chassis and powertrain are configured to allow the team to investigate different designs and their effects on power consumption and performance, including rear-wheel drive, all-wheel drive and front-wheel drive. The drift and track configurations have completely different front configurations like control arms and direction changes to allow extreme drift steering angles. The power delivery can be divided evenly between the front and rear, or completely between one or the other. Downforce points to more than 1,000 kg at 257 km / h (160 mph).
Out of my head, the only other AWD car I can think of that allows all combinations (AWD, RWD, and FWD) is a Citroën 2CV Sahara, which had two engines, front and rear, and could use them in whatever combination they wanted. I mean, it’s just three combinations, but still.
Our friend Bozi at Road track it has a nice deeper look into the suspension setup, and while it’s tempting to just plagiarize it, I suggest that you also read that article.
The Mach-e 1400 is certainly exciting and a tremendously impressive test bed of the kinds of fun problems you can face with electric propulsion, in case someone woke up from a coma in 1989 and still thinks vehicles Electric are golf cart. slow.
Ford will publicly display this in an unspecified NASCAR race soon, and while that should spark some interest in the production of Mach-e, all of these cars really share a basic monoblock and that they are both electric cars with more than one engine.
Still, everything is very exciting.
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