The new Mustang Mach-E is not only a very crucial model for Ford, it’s also the first vehicle other than the famous pony car to bear the Mustang name; the car maker apparently considers using the fabled nameplate to more vehicles in the future.

Murat Gueler, Ford’s European design chief confirmed the above to Autocar. “The Mach-E is our step into the future, without ignoring history,” he said. “There’s a lot of emotion with the Mustang, and it’s time to progress that and make it spread wider.”

Related: 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E Is A Modern Day Pony Car, For Better Or Worse

The electric Mustang Mach-E doesn’t make use of any Ford Blue Oval badges, using instead a redesigned pony badge in order to establish a stronger link with the Mustang and also “communicate the new-ness of this”. Gueler added: “We’ve talked about building a family.”

“The latest Mustang in Europe has gained another level of popularity, so we have a bigger base for the Mustang brand,” he adds. “The Mustang and the Porsche 911 are the most famous sports cars on the planet. Mustang is a big nameplate and it’s about time we applied electrification to it. People now understand we can do different things to different nameplates quite successfully.”

There are more electric Ford models in the pipeline but that doesn’t mean that the company will simply build more Mustang-badged EVs of different sizes and segments.

“We don’t want to take a Russian doll approach, where you can’t tell them apart other than the size of the car, but we want a family feel where a Ford EV starts to build off this concept,” he said. “But we’d never do a smaller version of this – if we did a smaller vehicle it would have different proportions.”

Gueler went on saying that the Mustang Mach-E started as a different project back in 2014 that was totally rebooted around two years ago, when the designers came up with the idea of using the Mustang as an inspiration. “The design had a big influence: the whole structure changed, the technology inside changed. We rebooted the whole programme,” he said.

 

Note: Independent Ford Mustang Coupe Crossover study by designer Yoen Woo Seong pictured in renderings