Yeah, it is too clean. "Sorry, Ford said we can't sell you an at cost retail unit."
How could we possibly assume, at this point, that Ford will only be able to fill 20% - 30% of My23 hybrid orders with the data provided so far? We only have a sample of the "online" community and a few dealerships stating that orders may be 80% hybrid. But 80% of what? 20K, 30K, 50K, 100K? We have no idea how many orders were placed before the order banks were closed. Maybe the order banks window was so short to ensure that they could produce and deliver all retail orders? We just don't know. For now.
If that were the case they could have just not accepted orders and waited for their stock... why accept it then refund it?
That makes no sense. There are around 3,000 Ford dealerships so if they can make 90,000 Mavericks that would be in the ballpark of 30 per dealership on average. There are of course tiny rural dealerships and mega dealers that would get different numbers of allocations but all comments about dealerships getting tiny allocations just does not add up. I think that the Ford Video Guy said that he expected things to become clearer in the next week or two.
That's kinda the point. Why would they pull the trigger so quickly? My dealer will refund the deposit if I don't get it in six months, but they will still keep the order active. We are just missing some facts, either from Ford or this dealer. Either they are going out of their way to be shady or they will have new management soon.
Yep. They could be wiping their hands and consciousnesses of the order, while having no plan to cancel it at all.
Actually, we can make a pretty good educated guess on how many orders were placed. Our sample size is actually not that small from a statistical analysis perspective and what has been reported is fairly consistent. I would be willing to bet big money that there were well in excess of 100k orders placed. Using conservative estimates, I would expect the number to be in the 150k-200k range. With 3000 dealers, 150k means an average of just 50 orders per dealer. Most of the small to mid-size dealers near me had twice that and larger dealers were seval hundred orders. Were there some super-small dealers that just took a handful of orders? Maybe. But in this case "handful" is still in the 10-20 range and more than made up for by the larger dealers that ordered 500+.
Ford posted that their mix of 2023 production was going to be 35% Hybrid /65 ECO- I think that's not some guess as to how many people are choosing hybrids vs eco , it's more of a cap they're putting on the order mix. If they took 120k orders and 80 percent were hybrid orders that's 96K hybrids, if they produced 30 percent of that total well that about 30k hybrid production...close to what their 35% cap is for the year. They should have put limitations in their software to decline models/options when they were over their caps they established, sure would be better than telling many people next year that well they're not getting one.
The 35% estimate has a lot to do with resource availability. Maybe Ford kept the banks open a little longer because they know something they haven't announced publicly yet. But my dealer warned against hybrid (I wanted EB anyway) and it seems those warnings were not unjustified.
