Matt Greenop: Give us the eight, mate

The 2015 Ford Mustang. Photo / Supplied

It's been a big year for big-name brands. Porsche's 911 is 50, McLaren is 50, Lamborghini is, too. Aston Martin ticked over its century. These are good times for marques that we love and admire - and it's great to see that New Zealanders are still enthusiastically plonking down their hard-earned dollars to buy such brilliant cars.

And its nice that we mere mortals, who haven't got a few hundred grand to drop on a car, can see them out there, on our roads, being used.

There's nothing worse than having a great car gathering dust in a garage, never to see the light of day.

By time you read this, we would have been to Sydney to see the long-awaited unveiling of the Ford Mustang that will be sold in New Zealand and Australia.

Our expectations are high, but it is possible that we'll see a four-cylinder EcoBoost variant and there'll be no V8 at all.

To me, Mustang means V8. With a pony on the grille, there really needs to be a rowdy, throbbing eight-pot somewhere close and getting past that could be tough work for the blue oval.

Bear in mind that the four-cylinder version of the Falcon, one of the best handling Falcons of all time, was ignored by buyers who instead took the "no replacement for displacement" view and bought the six.

And even then they didn't buy many, which is why that historic nameplate will be discontinued, along with its Territory SUV brethren, by 2016.

This is bad news for Ford fans, and if the Mustang isn't up to the spec that we expect, it could also be a miss.

Here's hoping that the powers-that-be in Aussie and in Dearborn, Michigan, accept that we want the Mustang that we remember from days of old. The throb of an eight is something that might signal big gas bills, but it's also what many would prefer, despite the pump costs.

Which brands or models of old would you like to see revisited, and do you think that smaller engines like the turbocharged EcoBoost two-litre have a place in any of these great "heritage" machines? Let us know at below or on Facebook at facebook.com/DrivenNZ