There’s a reason that ridiculously wide vehicles like the Ford F-150 Raptor, Bronco Raptor, and Ram TRX (and RHO) all have amber running lights front and back, and it’s not to look cool: it’s the law.
Turns out the 2025 Ford Mustang GTD is, dimensionally speaking, legally too wide to drive on public U.S. roads without amber marker lights like the hulking off-roaders noted above. At the launch for the Mustang GTD Design Manager Anthony Colard told The Drive Ford found a loophole in the law so they could avoid adding marker lights to the $325,000 (to start) Mustang.
Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) 108 states that larger vehicles, which usually are trucks, SUVs, and trailers, because what car is that wide, that are 80 inches or wider require clearance lamps (bookending the sides) and marker lights in the center with specific positioning and spacing rules. Ironically it’s about visibility, which, it’s hard to miss these behemoths on the road.
A Mustang is about 75 inches wide, typically. The Mustang GTD? It’s six inches wider measuring in at 81.8 inches, which translates to borderline cartoon-like proportions. Theoretically that meant the Mustang GTD needed amber marker and clearance lamps. The team wasn’t stoked, went looking for a way out of that situation, and found one.
Colard said it turns out the lamps are required on (typically) trucks and large vehicles because they are considered dual-purpose vehicles when you homologate them. This means the vehicles can be bought by companies and be both registered and used as work trucks.
The Mustang GTD is not considered a dual-purpose vehicle and was not homologated as such. The GTD is considered a single-purpose vehicle.
Notably I asked what happens if you own a race track and suddenly that GTD is now a work vehicle. Colard said someone could buy the GTD if they own a company, or even have their company buy it and own it, but “it is not a work vehicle. It’s not like a big truck or lorry or something else. You’re not going to tow anything with it. You’re not,” Colard said.
“Any vehicle you can put a sticker on saying ‘not for hire,’ then enters that category (referring to dual-purpose vehicles) where you need to have the lights,” Colard said.
Ford used a real technical interpretation within the FMVSS regulations to ensure the design of the Mustang didn’t have pickup-truck like lighting.
Should anyone buy a GTD and use it as their work vehicle, say, as a track taxi, guess this is one heck of a loophole.
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