RTR brings color-shifting Mystichrome paint back to the Ford Mustang

North Carolina-based tuner RTR Vehicles is re-releasing one of the Ford Mustang's most striking paint colors: Mystichrome. Part of the company's newly-announced Premium Paint Options palette, Mystichrome completely changes color depending on the light hitting it.

Mystichrome was called Mystic when it made its debut on the 1996 Mustang Cobra. It was short-lived, and it later appeared on the 2004 Mustang SVT Cobra as Mystichrome. Its color is difficult to pin down; it's either blue, green, gold, purple, or brown depending on lighting conditions. It's cool, but it was also seriously expensive. Ford charged $3,650 for this option in 2004, which represents around $6,100 in 2024. This partially explains why most historians agree that only about 1,010 units of the Mustang SVT Cobra were painted in Mystichrome.

Ford hasn't offered it since, but RTR is bringing it back for 2024 on the new Mustang. Not much has changed in the past 20 years, and the color remains mind-bogglingly different depending on how you look at it. What has changed is the price: Mystichrome now costs $15,995.

Buyers who don't want to settle for a factory paint color but also don't want to pay nearly the price of a new Nissan Versa for Mystichrome have several other options to choose from. RTR's new Extended Color Palette includes Leadfoot Gray, Azure Blue, Rosso Scuderia, NATO Olive, and Signal Green. These colors are priced at $8,995. Alternatively, the company can also apply a matte clearcoat to the factory color.

Paint-to-sample, a service that has become hugely popular in the upper echelons of the industry, is newly available as well. Put simply, RTR can create a one-of-a-kind paint color using a sample, which can be anything from the color of your 1965 Mustang, the color of your favorite sweatshirt, or the color of the cereal bowl you ate breakfast in as a kid. Selecting paint-to-sample adds $5,000 to the aforementioned sums.

RTR's started taking orders for its new paint colors in July 2024.