What to look for on test drive?

The typewriter tick can be found on any year gen 3 coyote but are more common on the 18's. Also as Hoytster has mentioned, the early MT-82's (11-17) were close ratio single overdrive with 5th gear being a 1:1 ratio and 6th being O.D. the MT-82/D4 (18+) is a wide ratio double overdrive with now 4th gear as 1:1 and 5th and 6th are overdrives. The early close ratio version was better suited to the high revving powerband of the coyote and despite the 25 hp and 20 tq increase with the gen 3 engine the 0 to 60 time remained the same with a manual GT.

Also if performance is a concern to you, look for a GT with the performance pack. They got 15" front brakes with 6 piston brembo calipers, heavy duty radiator, better suspension with thicker sway bars, 2 extra gauges mounted above the radio for vacuum and oil pressure, staggered wheels and tires with 19x9 with 255/40/19 F and 19x9.5 with 275/40/19 R, and a torsen

View: https://youtu.be/JEiSTzK-A2A

rear diff with either 3.55 (auto) or 3.73 (manual) gears.

If you plan to boost your coyote at some point, the two extra gauges can be swapped for the gauge pod from an ecoboost with the performance pack, it came with a factory vac/boost gauge and the whole pod is plug n play

https://lmr.com/item/M10849A/ford-performance-mustang-ecoboost-perf-pack-cluster-15-17

No tuning or modification needed to make it work, just install and go thats it. It's not as accurate as a real boost gauge but for a boosted street car it's good enough. And you get a factory boost guage that matches the other guages in the car and the my color feature (if your car has it) works as well.

I personally recommend a tune from ford racing. I have the stage 2 power pack from ford racing on my 17 and it comes with an 87 mm throttle body, the airbox, filter and cold air intake tube from the GT 350 and a tune to make it all work. The tune is flawless and is written by the same engineers who designed the car in the first place. It only gains 23 whp on a 15 to 17 but it also gains 40 lb ft of tq at 1500 rpm. It's like driving a different car. Ford also has the equivalent for the 18-21 GT's. There are those who will say you can get more from an aftermarket tuner but then you are just chasing a number. In the real world on the street you will never notice the extra 5-10 hp and most tuners can't seem to get that extra tq down low like ford can.

BTW, the gen 2 coyotes normally put down 375-380 to the tire and after adding the stage 2 pack, an x-pipe/resonator delete, ford racing sport mufflers, and long tube headers, my car put down 425 hp to the tires. Not bad for a car that only put out 435 hp at the flywheel when it left the factory. If I use the standard rule of thumb, that a manual trans gives a 15% driveline loss, the 425 at the tire equates to 500 hp at the flywheel. So I gained approx 65 hp. Those same mods on an 18+ gen 3 could get roughly 450-455 at the tire and around 525 at the flywheel.

Don't listen to the keyboard mechanics when they say long tubes are worthless on an N/A engine, that is a flat out lie. The show engine masters on motortrend and Richard Holdener on youtube have proven it to be false. LTH's make power across the board from idle to redline, the more power the engine makes the bigger the gains, and that's the truth. A 400-500 hp engine will gain around 20-30 hp just with LTH's, depending on how restrictive the stock exhaust was.