Dan Mihalascu is an accomplished automotive journalist with over two decades of automotive media work both internationally and in his home country of Romania.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, and he has reviewed (sometimes even raced) cars for most of his professional life.
Prior to joining HotCars.com in July 2025, Dan worked as a news writer and editor for InsideEVs.com, CarScoops.com and Autoevolution.com. He also has bylines at DriveMag.com and ConsumerAffairs.com, among other international media outlets.
In Romania, he wrote for car magazines, sports newspapers and even a TV news station.
Writing and cars aside, he loves reading, cycling, hiking and spending quality time with his family.
The Ford Mustang was a big topic during CEO Jim Farley’s recent appearance on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, where the executive downplayed the muscle car’s dwindling U.S. sales, saying the Mustang is “doing really well” if global sales are taken into account.
At one point, a listener asked whether the Mustang’s locked ECUs were behind the recent drop in U.S. sales, and Farley was adamant that was not the case. “I would absolutely say the drop in sales is not due to that,” Ford‘s chief executive replied.
But then he went on to say that his own son, Jameson, who is 17, preferred an older Mustang to the new one because the S650 generation is much more difficult to tune than its predecessors. “I have this debate with my son, actually, because he has an older Mustang. He didn’t buy the new one for reasons like that,” Farley said. Next, he went deeper into the issue of vehicle tunability, calling it a “real dilemma” for Ford that has “no easy answer.” However, digital technology might bring a solution for this in the future.
“We want people to modify their cars, but we also have to take quality and privacy really seriously. I think he was talking more about the performance of the vehicle, and over time, our approach would be to give people the option to digitally adjust their vehicle from Ford, so that we can maintain quality but still let the user have their own idea of performance. That’s different for everyone, and I think that vision will come to life in the coming years.”
Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Farley on The Verge’s Decoder podcast
He noted that the aftermarket is a big challenge for the company because writing software in the control module to get better performance can result in serious reliability and quality issues that could prove very expensive. Farley then provided another example from his family.
“My daughter’s boyfriend is one of these people. He bought a brand new F-150, he’s got a supercharger on it. He recently got a bunch of error codes because he updated the ECU against Ford’s standards, and now he needs thousands of dollars of expensive repairs because the vehicle has started chewing its camshaft. It was great that he could get 650 horsepower out of his EcoBoost F-150. He didn’t think about what he was doing to the reliability of the vehicle, but we have to at Ford.”
Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Farley on The Verge’s Decoder podcast
As Farley put it, Ford wants to give customers a chance to tune their vehicles, but it isn’t going to let its quality reputation suffer just to give a person the ability to modify a vehicle – he calls that a “hard compromise for us to make.”
As a reminder, the seventh-generation Ford Mustang is much more difficult to tune compared to previous generations because of its new Fully Networked Vehicle (FNV) electrical architecture, which restricts access to the engine control unit (ECU). While it brings benefits like over-the-air updates and cybersecurity, FNV is a big hurdle for owners who want to unleash more power and performance from their S650 Mustang.
Until recently, the factory ECU was locked down tight, blocking tuners from adjusting timing, fuel, and boost tables without a costly workaround. It took more than two years for someone to crack the Mustang’s locked-down ECU, and that happened this summer when HP Tuners finally breached the MG1CS036 controller.
The breakthrough opened the door for real calibration control and power gains validated on the dyno. HP Tuners is already offering tuning support for the S650 Mustang and other Ford models that utilize FNV, such as the Bronco, F-150, Ranger Raptor and Expedition.
Source: The Verge
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