Can someone explain why order priorities are totally ignored by Ford?

[BigPop]

Order priority really only maters on a dealer level. Every week dealers get reordered (for every vehicle line). So there is just some random chance as to where your dealer is in the Maverick scheduling line that week. If some option is used up by the time your dealers allocation gets looked at you will be skipped over. The older orders probably also get priority at a dealer level, but not sure how this relates to the overall scheduling?

I do think that Ford will concentrate on making sure as many of the early orders as possible get scheduled.

So some of this is just random chance. Not sure if that helps make you feel better or not! I ordered June 9th. I was priority 2 for months....and was also our dealership's first order, but the 3rd to schedule. Hold on, you're week will come!

Thanks for the info, and the encouragement. I still don’t understand this allocation stuff. If you have the time and could draft a question that I could ask my dealer about that I’d be most appreciative. I’m so confused by this process I don’t know what to ask.

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[JASmith]

It's a fault of the dealer distribution system.

Yep, which begs the question, what value is the "middle-man" offering compared to just having direct sales from Ford?

Research has concluded that as much as 30 percent of the cost of a car is the cost of distribution, primarily the dealer distribution and overhead and profits that the dealer extracts as a handler. For example, years back around the time of the bailout Chrysler was allowing employees to purchase vehicles at the manufacturer's cost, not the dealer invoice, and it turned out to be about half of MSRP, just to show how much overhead can be involved. With polls showing as high as 80% of the population are in favor of direct sales, why are they non-existent aside from Tesla? Because Tesla was new and didn't have a union of auto dealerships lobbying their state governments directly, and even still they had legal barriers thrown up that they had to fight. Its almost always on a state level though, and so many people don't pay attention to that, which unfortunately costs everyone a lot in hassle and money. Anticompetitive laws traditionally also helped out the big manufacturers in acting as a gateway to keep out new startups, because having the capital to start making your vehicles is one thing but to create a dealer network from scratch to sell them is a whole other hurdle, and that helped keep out competition (which worked perfectly until very recently with new players like Rivian, Lordstown, and Lucid).

So tl;dr version is that to get rid of the dealer model you really need a federal solution, so that's where the pressure needs to be to change laws.