WhistlinDiesel Fails To Destroy a Car on the First Try – a Mustang GT CS Is Not Having It

However, no car-manufacturing company designs, engineers, and assembles automobiles with immediate destruction in mind. Enter YouTube’s rider of the carpocalypse, Cody Detwiler, better known by his social media alias WhistlinDiesel. Hold your horses, cowboys—it’s Mustang break-in time! And this is not a metaphor, I’m afraid, so Ford fans better look the other way.

Detwiler is notorious for taking perfectly good cars to places they absolutely don’t belong, and his YouTube channel is rich with his nefarious car-mudgeon activities. Remember the G-Wagen Mercedes going through the roof (and endurance hell)? How about the torched Ferrari F8 Tributo, which set fire to a field of corn stover with its overheated brake rotors while doing donuts?

The list could go on and on and on (Chevy K20, Ford Model A, Tesla Model 3, Challenger Hellcat, Toyota Hilux, you name it). Still, the idea is transported from one car to the next. Now it’s America’s favorite pony car’s turn to feel the wrath of social media’s ‘View, Like, and Share’ trinity of money-making content creation tyranny.

The Mustang is an automobile designed to carry two people in relative comfort (or four crammed occupants, if you really squish two more not-tall passengers in that joke insufficiently-sized of a back seat) over blacktop roads. It occasionally spins out of control when the drivers think too highly of themselves. That’s what happens when an overconfident and underskilled driver thinks a Mustang is just another well-mannered pony used for occasional half-hour horse-back trips.

This is also the main theme of WhistlinDiesel’s video – to make the Mustang behave in the same road-raging manner on the track and in the woods until mechanical decease is officially pronounced. That’s right, in the woods, over gravel and grass.

Whoever said the emblematic pony car is not suited for hill-climbing with track tires on apparently has no understanding of out-of-the-box motoring. Car nuts will immediately seize the opportunity to say that a front-engined, rear-wheel-drive automobile is not properly weight-balanced to push its heft up a slope.

And they’d be right; the 2024 Mustang GT isn’t in its ideal habitat over abundant vegetation in free-range cattle pastures (or through other natural environments of botanical lifeforms), let alone go uphill on grass and dirt and downhill straight through thick undergrowth. And yet, the Mustang does all that – albeit with a bit of encouragement and a lot of mechanical torture.

To put more traction on the driven wheels, the YouTubers add extra weight to the trunk of the car (an anvil and cinder blocks are just what the Mustangs were not designed to carry). But this is where the ‘Built Ford Tough’ motto reveals itself to be not just fancy advertisement copywriting—the Mustang takes all the beating with dignity, even when it bleeds oil through its headlamp.

I mean, how many cars will turn on while upside down and with a sturdy piece of wood installed as an after-market add-on in the radiator? What is not wrong with the car can probably be written on a thumbnail. Still, a single WhistlinDiesel video-making field testing session cannot break the Mustang's wild spirit. On the other hand, the body is another thing—one absolutely covered with battle scars.

For all that’s worth, the car that Cody Detwiler and his crew have turned into a crumple of agonizing components (that, by some miracle of pistons, still runs and drives) is an older GT California Special (2017 model year by the looks of it) with a five-liter Coyote V8 and a six-speed manual.

The eight-cylinder normally puts out 435 hp and 400 lb-ft (441 PS, 542 Nm). However, there is nothing special about the Golden State edition of the sixth-generation Mustang GT, except a few cosmetic touchups.

The YouTuber’s declared intentions are to drive the Mustang ‘until it’s totaled,’ the abused Ford cannot be deemed as such because, at the end of the video, it still drives. Granted, there’s not much left of it, but the purpose of the video was defeated by the car’s sheer will to live on for another WhistlinDiesel-filled shooting session involving red vehicles.

The color factor is critical because all his previous endeavors involving car-destroying antics were performed on red automobiles (the G-Wagen, the Ferrari, the Hellcat, the K20 square body – they were all red). I do expect a sequel to this video.

In true, honest-to-mayhem Cody Detwiler YouTubing tradition, all his tests ended with the cars shredded to pieces (burned to the ground, in the case of the F8 Tributo Prancing Horse, which committed suicide by fire). However, who’s willing to take my bet that this Mustang might get other, less dramatic roles in entertaining the video platforms communities in future episodes?