Ready for the New Mustang vs. 911 Rivalry?

What is Ford doing chasing Nürburgring lap records with a Mustang? This is territory usually owned by Porsche, who set the outright lap record in 2018 with the 919 Evo in a time of 5:19. And seemingly with each new generation of GT product, 911s have continued to beat times set by race cars and prototypes. However, with the Camaro dead (again), Ford is justified in pursuing a new rivalry, and targeting the 911 might not be as crazy as it sounds. Both history and data show that the similarities between the two companies and their two most popular performance models run deeper than you might think.

Ford and Porsche seem like automakers at opposite ends of the car-making world. They started building cars in different eras. One raced towards mass production. The other went specialized and upmarket. However, the two companies are named after their founders, and descendants of those founders still hold top positions in each. Both have deep roots in sports car racing. Ford got an overall Le Mans win first, but Porsche has more wins at the French endurance race than anybody else, and both companies won using a more-is-more approach with more money and horsepower than the competition.

Today, both the mass-producer and the sports-car maker make most of their money from building trucks and/or SUVs. They’ve used that cushion to keep their sporting lineages alive, and now their main performance models—the Mustang and 911—have become cars that come in dozens of configurations and performance levels.

The cars do have their obvious differences. The world first learned about both Mustang and 911 back in 1964, but from the beginning, Ford emphasized the Mustang’s affordable fun to a youthful audience, and that image has mostly stuck. Hagerty insurance policy and quote demographics show that this is still true. The Mustang is the more youthful car, with 67 percent of quotes from people born after 1964 compared to 62 percent for the 911. The 911 is catching up fast, though, because five years ago, the Mustang’s advantage was 13 percent, and now it is just five percent.

Looking at those quotes split into model years, we see that the Mustangs made up to about 2005 tend to have a stronger appeal among Gen X and younger enthusiasts. The share of quotes between these two cars draws closer as we look at newer cars—since the 2010 model year, the absolute difference in share has averaged about four percent, while from the 1960s through the 1990s the absolute difference averaged over 18 percent.

According to recent changes in value within the Hagerty Price Guide, we see a similar convergence. Early Mustangs and 911s have very different trajectories, but beginning around the 2005 model year and newer cars, valuation changes for the two are tracking similarly. Specifically, these data chart the percentage change in the condition #3 (“good”) value over three years, averaged across the model year.

Tracking the behavior of newer models requires looking at a different data set, as the Hagerty Price Guide doesn’t cover Mustangs after 2014 or the newest (2020+) 911s. Comparing premiums over MSRP for the 2018 Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 to the 2018 Porsche 911 GT3 reveals demand changes in similar ways since the cars were launched.

Comparing the 2018 Porsche 911 GT2 RS to the 2020 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 isn’t as clean because of the different model years, but the premium over MSRP starts to converge in 2023.

Since all Mustang GTDs are spoken for, it will be a while before the secondary market establishes itself enough to provide discernable trends. That said, if the data on the existing vehicles is anything to go by, it won’t be the least bit surprising to see the GTD following similar market trend lines to the 911’s GT products. Will it even creep up to the near-100-percent premium we’ve observed for the 911 S/T? It’s too soon to tell, but we expect this Ford vs. Porsche rivalry to continue to heat up.