Sydney Sweeney never planned on being the TikTok car girl. But her 1.7 million followers on the platform can’t get enough of her adventures under the hood. And today she’s revealing another notch in her mechanic’s belt: a one-of-a-kind Mustang GT she designed with an all-women team, for Ford’s 60th anniversary.
“My entire partnership with Ford has been the biggest achievement of my life, to be honest,” she says. “I love it so much.”
Sweeney is legitimately giddy when she delivers this line. The word gushing should be used sparingly, but it’s the word that comes to mind. In her personal hierarchy of triumphs, starring roles in critically acclaimed shows like The White Lotus and Euphoria are sprinkles on the proverbial sundae of being enshrined in car history.
It started when she was filming the second season of Euphoria in 2021, and needed a hobby to ground herself. “I just wanted something that would bring me home in a way, and I always felt the most ‘Syd’ when I was in the shop,” she says. “I’m a very creative hands-on type of person. Like in school growing up, I couldn’t just read something and learn it. I had to somehow make it an interactive activity for myself.”
Sweeney comes from a family of mechanics in a small town near Spokane, Washington, and she learned to drive on her grandfather’s F-100 farm truck, which she still owns today. During the pandemic, she bought an original 1969 Bronco, which needed some heavy restoration. Her best friend’s dad owns an auto shop in the North Hollywood Valley, and said he’d give her some space to work on the Bronco.
“I never actually had the intention of, Oh, I’m going to share this with everybody,” she says. “But my mom and dad would ask, ‘What was the latest thing you did this week?’ or, ‘How’s the car looking?’ They wanted me to send them videos of me working on the car. Then I saw that everyone was editing their videos with TikTok, and they were cool, easy videos. I’m like, Oh, this could be fun.”