Will Ford prevent dealers from selling price channels?

Ford is facing an increasing situation of selling price channel cars. The brand’s models, like the Ford Bronco, have long suffered from unreasonable price increases from dealers. It’s an issue that’s happened many times before, and it’s starting to repeat itself with the new Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup. The price of this model has now reached more than 100,000 USD in the US.

Customers who want to own this model but have not yet booked a car have only 2 options: accept the selling price (maybe with a very high “lost”) at the dealer or wait until 2023.

Although Ford has tried to limit the situation of genuine dealers selling cars with “beer with peanuts”, in fact many customers still find ways to “collaborate” with the dealer’s staff to get a good position on the waiting list. bought this model, so it is very difficult to manage. In addition, there is a previous deposit situation and then resell the deposit to new customers for several thousand dollars.

Ford tried to solve this problem, by telling dealers that it would be best for them to stop selling price channels or else it would no longer be able to supply them. However, that warning did not have much effect. So Ford is trying a different approach. The brand is implementing a more stringent name-matched policy worldwide.

Understandably, the name-matching policy stipulates that when a person orders a vehicle through a dealer, they must be the sole recipient of that vehicle. That sounds like exactly how dealers are supposed to operate, but sometimes they use the system to ‘hide’ stock and speculate, hoarding, by falsely telling Ford about the cars it’s ordered. buy (which in fact no one buys).

The new policy stipulates that 75% of cars ordered by dealers must match the name of the customer. Previously, a provision allowed dealers a period of 120 days from the date of receipt of the order to the date of delivery to remedy the consequences if they were found to be selling price channel cars. They will now be held accountable for any name-matching policy violations, no matter the circumstances.

The penalty for policy violations is now that dealers will be fined based on monthly sales and if they violate three times, they will be completely removed from the applicable vehicle sales policies. That means the business of repeat dealers will be extremely difficult.

In Vietnam, the situation of some Ford models is also sold by dealers with prices ranging from a few dozen to several hundred million dong. The new Explorer line even had a time when it was shouted at 300 million VND.