CEO Farley: Ford is Going to 100% Online, Fixed-Price Sales For EVs

[rdr854]

I agree with seeing it in person. I think a big role of dealers going forward will be as demonstration facilities. They have 1 or 2 of each vehicle in stock for folks to test out before they order.

I also like what Polestar has been doing. You can order what you want, but they also have a central inventory of a few common configurations that you can get in a week or two instead of waiting for a build week. Good solution for those who need a car urgently (and maybe let them use a demo unit while waiting).

There are customers who genuinely cannot wait for a car to be built and shipped - whether it be due to destruction of the car or catastrophic failure or changed circumstances where public transportation does not work due to job changes. For those sorts of reasons, manufacturers need to make sure that dealers/delivery centers have some inventory available to meet those needs.

As a kid in the 1960s, my parents new cars were all special ordered up until the time one got wrecked which meant that the replacement was bought off the light. That said, the configuration of that car was so weird, that it was apparent that it had been a special order. The other new cars that my parents bought after that were all special orders. This is the European sales model and no reason it cannot work here.

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[NW Ontario Ford Lightning]

Too bad that wasn’t this year, maybe I could have avoided ADM from the dealer.


https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a40175990/ford-online-sales-no-negotiation/

https://www.freep.com/story/money/c...online-sales-non-negotiable-price/7468899001/

"We've got to go to nonnegotiated price. We've got to go to 100% online. There's no inventory (at dealerships), it goes directly to the customer. And 100% remote pickup and delivery," Ford CEO Farley said in New York during Bernstein's 38th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference streamed live."​

Interesting to read over this thread from 2022 - never happened, and now 'negotiated price' means paying far below MSRP - for now, at least - while it is a buyers' market.

 

[HOTAS]

This is how an Awesome product, with high owner satisfaction, becomes a sales failure.

EV’s need to be direct sales only. But the dealers will be even more resistant to support them. Obviously it’s a quandary that nobody but Tesla has come close to solving.

 

[NW Ontario Ford Lightning]

It seems to me, the dealers "have had it too good" for far too long, (monopoly) and will be the ones that need to adapt to a new paradigm. The fact that EV's don't need constant maintenance and dealer support draws a lot of attention to the failings of ICE vechicles in general, failings that we have been overlooking/accepting for decades.

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