peterjank said:
I think you are mis-informed with regard to Ford's intent with the GT program. Ford never intended to produce enough cars to satisfy demand at the MSRP. The intent was to reward their best dealers with a car they could (1) use as a halo car to draw people into their dealerships and (2) mark-up and sell at a huge profit. I heard this directly from the sales manager at my local Ford dealer when I spoke with him about being placed on a waiting list for the GT in 2002. The sales manager compared it to Ford's revival of the Thunderbird. A limited production run designed to allow the dealers to extract a markup.
As you say, the overall effect was to sour me on purchasing any car from Ford. Lucky for me, I ran into Fran Hall and learned about Race-Car-Replicas.
One of my friends was intimately involved with the design and development of the Ford GT. He was basically 'the guy' that sorted out the engine problems initially (the original motor was based on the Ford Lightning and would blow up catastrophically), and later was involved with the 'fix' during the big engine recall.
You are right on your first point--they were designed to give Ford generally, and dealers specifically, publicity and foot-traffic through the door. They were NOT created to be a huge cash cow for the dealers to sell at extortion prices.
The entire business model of the car was based upon the notion of selling 4500 cars before changing laws legislated them out of existence. Remember, Ford doesn't make a DIME more, when a dealer charges 2x the MSRP to the customer. Due to the weird laws in our country, manufacturers are prohibited from selling automobiles to individuals. Instead, they are forced to sell them to distributors or dealers, who then in turn mark them up and sell them to individuals.
Believe me, Ford was NOT marking up the cars when selling them to the distributors/dealers. All that profit was happening downstream of Ford. So, because only 2500-ish cars were built before the whole affair collapsed, Ford financially got clobbered. Admittedly, the program was probably never going to be a money-making affair anyway (although management didn't sign off on the program until it was demonstrated that it would be), but for sure, it has lost much more than it was supposed to.
Oh, and BTW now you can easily buy a brand new Ford GT at well UNDER MSRP from numerous dealers--in many cases, the same dealers who refused offers OVER the MSRP for these same cars. I have several friends who were turned away by their dealer when they made a reasonable offer over MSRP, who recently got phone calls from the dealer informing them of the 'opportunity' to now buy the car at the price they had offered.
Each of them said 'no thanks', several of them in language not suitable for this forum.
As an aside, the demographic for the new Ford GT and an original-ish GT40 have almost no crossover. If you want a really fantastic modern exotic car, the GT40 is not for you. And if you want a true 60's racing icon, the Ford GT is not for you.
Oh, and a special thanks to Jimmy for offering an argument for the price increase. One thing about SPF that really impresses me is the fact that the human beings that are running the company are so willing to work with, and communicate with their customer base (and potential customer base, and even potentially alienated customer base).
I have never bought a new car in my life. For some time I thought the SPF would be my first new car. Unless things change, it will likely wind up being my next used car, somewhere down the road. I have a feeling they will depreciate slowly, and at some point will get down to where I thought they would be in the first place.....
