Originally Posted by JungleZ

This is from a 45 year old veteran Tech who works mainly with LS motors and muscle cars.

"As for the motor, it is absolute ****. The pistons and rods are CHEAP CAST JUNK. I'm amazed that ford would build an engine with such inferior parts. If you buy one of the cars, DO NOT attempt to install blowers, turbo's, or nitrous without first rebuilding the motor with quality internals. You will inevitably have a catastrophic failure in short order. We took the stock pistons and rods to our local machine shop/engine builder and he started laughing histerically when he examined them. I also contacted a friend a the local ford dealer,and he told me they had seen several failures of the pistons already. The problem is the castings, they are extremely poor quality. The piston that failed in our motor shows zero signs of trauma on the surface, but a large section between the upper and lower rings simply cracked and fell apart, taking the rings with it. You can see looking at it closely that there are small air bubbles in the aluminum. Anyway, i'm not ford bashing here, between myself and my brothers, we've owned 6 different stangs in the past 15 years, and I was hoping for good things from the new models. Not gonna happen though. My advice would be to save your money for the Boss, or gt500 versions with forged internals, as the standard 5.0 is a turd. Oh and don't mod a car thats not paid off. Our customer is not a happy man as he still owe's 30k on a car with bad pistons and NO warranty. I'll get some detailed pics of the pistons up on tues so you can see what i'm talking about."