Ownership Verified: American Muscle - My 2013 Ford Mustang GT Premium

You manage to get your GT500s on? Feel free to toss me a PM if not, I can describe the process I took in more detail.
 
Put them on yesterday! Thanks for the tip of sliding them all the way back on the hanger to mount the hanger back up! Worked beautifully!
It's a LOT quieter right now. I have to get used to that. A lot less brutal than it used to be.

BUT

If you step on it, it still wakes up all right :D

Next up: Oil change!
 
Minor update:
Finally did the oilchange, went for Motorcraft Synthetic 5w30 instead of 5w20 to give it a little more heat resistance. Also did a tire rotation. Really loving the GT500 mufflers.
 
Did another autocross. This time the track was much more suited towards powerful cars, so I ended up 2nd out of 9 in class.
Had a friend of mine co drive the car and despite the grueling heat the car held up just fine.

Here's some videos for you to enjoy. My second run was my fastest, and Matt's 3rd run was his fastest.


http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9CSrHfOJhogxCE5shXUVlBKsAqNa6gYm
 
:thumbsup: Looks like a ton of fun!
 
American Muscle - My 2013 Ford Mustang GT Premium

It sure was! Next event is 9/7/2014 so more videos to come.
I will try to cut the padding under the hood that basically make the vents in there useless, and get a water sprayer to keep tire temperatures down.

Should be fun!
 
Another weekend, another auto-x:

[video]https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9CSrHfOJhoi3AGNqR4D_sQivQ2tngyK9[/video]
 
Got my Takata airbag recall notification today. Of course they can't do anything about it right now, but I should be aware of the risk of death...
Thanks Ford...
 
Just got mine friday as well

"You might die, but don't worry because we'll replace it... eventually. Also, don't ask us about it. We'll tell you when we're ready"
 
Yep. Mine cane in as well last week. As Captain_Whine put it... They put a shotgun in our steering wheel, but don't have the parts to replace it.
 
Still no update from Ford but with vacations, business travel and a lot better weather than expected I still haven't driven it much since the recall came.
 
Got an email from Ford telling my there's an update to the SYNC system. So I threw that on the car today. Car has to be running and it takes 15mins which seems excessive but hey, whatever.

Pretty nice upgrade in my opinion. Added artist and title display when streaming bluetooth audio no matter if its mp3s or pandora / spotify. Really nice for me, because my phone screen usually shows waze.
But the best new feature is that it automaitcally resumes bluetooth audio streaming after the car has been turned off and back on. In the past If I jumped out to get the mail and got back into the car I had to wait for the reconnect or force it and then manually switch back to bluetooth audio. No more!

Highly recommended
 
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Was gonna message you about that but didn't get around to it. Decided to randomly check a few days ago and saw it had just been released. Thanks for the heads up on install time.
 
Yeah. I read through it. Probably will just have my dealer do it when I bring her in for an oil change after taking it out of storage.
 
Decided to download the Sync update in preparation for taking the car out of storage this weekend, but the Ford Owner's site kept glitching out for me and not letting me download it. Contacted support on the site and got the following

Unfortunately, that update was put on the site, for everyone, in error. Thus, it has been pulled from the site and no one can install it at this time. There are future updates in development now. You can disregard version 4.4, and when you see a new update notification on the site, you?ll be able to install that version. We apologize for the inconvenience and confusion.
Click to expand...
 
Not a whole lot of updates on the car itself, but my repatriation to Germany is coming up next year, so I started researching some options to bring the car with me.
I put the car on uship.com and got quotes from $850 to $1500 for shipping from Norfolk VA to Bremerhaven. Not really sure how to aproach the shipping yet. It would be a big plus for me to be able to use the interior space of the car to move some stuff back to Germany, but that does not appear to be very popular with the shipping companies.

I also started looking into the options of how to make the car street legal in Germany. That seems actually not as complicated as I thought. First of all there are several companies that offer turn key solutions. 2 that I requested quotes from are:

Kalkofen (http://www.auto-kalkofen.de/us-car-service/ who conventiently are located in Bremerhaven close to the port.

and

UScars24 http://www.uscars24.de/Deutsch/US-Importe/SelbstImport.html who are closer to where I'm probably going to end up living.

Both charge north of 2200EUR for the conversion incl. German title and registration. Since that seems quite a bit, I started researching what they acutally do for the money and for my car it comes down to these items:

Engine/Powertrain: Emissions need to be certified with the TUEV. To get your car certified by the TUEV costs 5k EUR in testing easily if it wasn't for this fantastic website: https://www.abgasdatenbank.com/index.html They will sell you the certificate for emissions with your VIN on it (important!) for about 250EUR.

Headlights: Mine are HID, so headlight washers are required. With the correct paperwork (again from https://www.abgasdatenbank.com/index.html), auto levelling is not necessary. Hella sells a headlight washer kit that I will put on the car while it is still on US soil.

Tail lights: Sequential turn signals are ok, but need to be red. Rear foglight needs added. This will be costly and tricky. The taillights on the 2013 mustang are sealed LED units, with their own control module/ECU built into the light housing. So this is not a simple matter of changing out bulbs unfortunately...
I found a guy in Poland, who will convert the lights to EU/Germany spec for 500EUR. This means integrated rear fog light and keeping sequencial turn signals. Both these things are important to me. Here's an example of his work:

And then there's some money involved getting the TUEV approval and paperwork processed. But compared to the turn key conversions, it looks like I can save at least 1000EUR, so that's the route I'm most likely going to take.
It hinges a little bit on the question whether or not I can drive the car in Germany on Ohio plates until I have the conversion completed. For US citizens this seems to be possible, but if that exception also applies to me is a question that so far no one can really answer...
 
It's possible for less than a year I thought.
 
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