It's so easy to just point out the entry price of cars and argue that being cheaper is always the best. But you totally forgot to see why the Camaro was more expensive than the 15 Mustang GT. And this is coming from someone who owned a 15 GT and still think the car is great.
As a note, my opinion is based on the european GT model, which is pretty much the maxed out equipment of a GT incl. Perofrmance Package 1.
Some examples:
- Ride quality. The ride quality in the 15 GT (even with PP1) is only useful if you want to cruise. As soon as you want to drive it like a sportscar it's bad. Wheel hopping, a lot of bodyroll. And if you want to drive above 180 kph the whole car starts to shake. The MR in the Camaro in comparison is extremely good, the only reason to upgrade to an aftermarket one is when you are track focussed. You can even drive the vmax of 290 kph (Germany
) in the Camaro without feeling unsafe.
- Build quality. In the Camaro its to this day miles ahead of the GT. A lot of 15+16 models had totally crooked rearwindows, a lot of parts are not aligned very well and even the refresh comes with some crazy gapsunder the headlights (I could fit my finger in the gap of one I saw) on some cars. Fords quality control is just horrible.
- Material quallity. Just touch the steering wheel on a 15 GT. It feels like really bad plastic, because the leather is so thin and painted with some cheap paint. The Camaro in comparison has a high quality leather steering wheel like you get from BMW etc. Same goes for the seats, Fords seats tend to have waves and start to crack within the first 10k miles.
- Increased visiual quality: Just look how many parts Chevy is painting the Camaro where Mustang just goes with unpainted plastic: front grilles, diffusor, most parts of the engine bay.
- Wheels. The Pirelli Pzero on the 15 Mustang GTs were the worst wheels I have even driven. As soon as the road is just a little wet, you have to drive like a granny to not fly out of a corner, even at low speed.
- Exhaust. The 15 GT sounds just bad. It's just way too quiet, that is in no way the V8 experience people want. The Camaro sounds way better especially with the NPP.
- Infotainment. SYNC2 was horrible in the Mustang. The navigation was not able to show you informations/arrows in the instrument cluster, only on the center console screen. In the Camaro you can even display that stuff in the HUD. Even with SYNC3 a lot of stuff is just badly designed in the Mustang. Rev Match is bound to being in sportmode, Camaro uses the paddles, with the current mustang you can't even set up exhaust note, ride mode, etc like you can in the Camaro. As soon as the leave the car, everything is set back to normal. Camaro can be leaved in track exhaust and ride mode without problems.
- I would even say the LT1 engine is the better engine in every single way compared to the Coyote in the 15 GT. The Coyote is missing torque and really needs to get above 4k RPM to get going. The LT1 has way more low-rpm power and even get's better milage when cruising.
To be fair, Ford stepped up their game with the refresh. They added Magnetic Ride, active valve exhaust, competition for the 1LE with the Performance Package 2, threw away the Pzero wheels, increased steering wheel and leather quality, updated the coyote for more low-rpm power and most of the other stuff. But for this reason they had to increase their base prices by a huge amount so now it's pretty much on par with 6th Gen Camaro.
Listen, I really liked my 15GT, but if you have driven both cars with more than a day, you can feel at every single thing of this car why the 6th Camaro launched way more expensive than the Mustang GT at this time. Chevy knew what they did, they wanted to build a high quality sportscar and not just the cheap V8 cruiser. That's why the price went up. They of course calculated that this will decrease sales, but my guess is that the higher price is also giving them more profit per car than a lower priced model.