sugar magnolia wrote: ↑Wed Jun 08, 2022 10:22 am
Azastan wrote: ↑Wed Jun 08, 2022 9:21 am
Dealers can price gouge all they want if they hang onto the demo model, is that how it works?
Indeed, why would they care about a $25000 fine if they make enough to cover the fine and make a profit anyway?
I don't think there are any but the demo models available yet. Just pre-orders for them. And I doubt Ford will be shipping additional demos to dealerships that sell the demo they already got.
Okay, all this I'm about to say is my opinion and not necessarily the opinion of the motorcar company.
By law, dealers can charge what they want and Ford is more or less powerless to stop them.
A fine can be imposed as provided by in the Dealer Agreements they all signed at one time or another and obviously if the fine is $25k but they can get $70K over MSRP I guess some of them are all in for that.
The "FCTP Mannequin" is something they do when a new model comes out, usually one that everyone is waiting on and there is gonna be some wait involved for them to get inventory. The Mannequin is the new model demo that a company sends and tells the dealer "this is to show off, we want it on your floor to advertise the ones that are on the way so don't sell it". It is ALWAYS a pretty tricked out high trim level all the options model. Dealers get in trouble for selling them early and I think but I'm not sure they are kind of pre-production models. Not prototypes but what are called PPAP models that are the ones sent down the line when we're still making sure all these parts we sourced from all over the world and have here now will actually work on the line we built to assemble them into cars. Its a thing, you can design a new part and then design a line to build the new part but there is a time when they first meet each other and sometimes there are questions.
SO the mannequins are fully saleable parts and they might well have flown down the assembly line with no problems the first time we tried. But that would be unusual.
Anyhow, sometimes they are pre production and may have things about them that got changed before production. Might have a cooler of seats that wasn't offered in the final version or a combination of options that you can't in real life order once they start building them for real. That does happen, it might work out that if you want X axel and Y wheels and the Z wheelbase, they will all fit together when an engineer designs them in a studio, but 4 years later when another engineer is trying to build them it turns out that the combination of those things is hard to figure out in the line as set up, or it might take more time to bolt all those parts together than what is called TAKT time, which is the unbendable amount of time for a process to be done. If TAKT time is 54 seconds, that means that every single task on the assembly line has to be able to be completed in 54 seconds and trust me kids, they will not allow for something to take 55 seconds just so you can have the Black 5 spoke wheels with the 3.73 differential and long wheelbase and dual rear wheels. They may only find that out when they try to build one that way, during the various stagers of figuring things out of which PPAP is one. SO its possible that there were 52 built that way and later sent out as mannequins, but when they crank up the line for real it never happens again. For this reason, sometimes they become collector's cars later one because they are things that shouldn't be. Mustangs in the 60s and 70s had some things like this. One I know of is a mid 70's Torino that an executive wanted with different color seatbelts than what you could get with the color paint it had. Just before that model year Henry Ford II had a fit about people doing things like that and when the executive asked, the Assembly Plant Manager didn't want to do it, but agreed to have them put the color seatbelts he wanted in the trunk, shipped the car that way, and techs in the E-garage in Dearborn changed them for him. (I got that story from a book, I don't know who it was)
Anywho, strange tangent journey later... Dealers can sell them if they want, they might have to pay a fine which they will.... but the revenge is, they might not get as many more of them as they want and if I ran the place, the one they slapped some stupid "Market Adjustment" on would be the last one of that model year they ever got. Furthermore, I'd make sure the dealers around them got plenty.
But I don't run the place, so...