Despite Ford issuing a warning to dealers earlier this year about activities that were damaging to the brand, one dealer in Florida has taken it to the extreme and doubled the price of the F-150 Lightning with a “market adjustment.”
The offending dealer is Gary Smith Ford in Fort Walton Beach, who was able to secure a base model F-150 Lightning Pro. Parked on the showroom floor, the truck has a base price of $69,554.
According to the window sticker, this price includes a protection package, fender well liners, first aid and roadside assistance kits, and nitrogen. Then there are a number of “dealer installed accessories” for what appears to be a reasonable price of $1,495.
However at the very bottom the sticker there is a very unreasonable market adjustment of $69,554, the same as the base MSRP. (via F150LightningForum.com)
Add it all up and the bare-bones F-150 Lightning is being sold for over double the original price at $140,603.
UPDATE June 8 12:32pm PST: Ford’s North America Product Communications Director Mike Levine has said this was an error and the dealership mistakenly inputted the MSRP twice, and that the sticker has been removed.
Whether they will be able to sell the Lightning at that price remains to be seen, but based on the experience of another dealer that attempted a similar markup, the answer is likely no.
In May we told you about DHC Ford of Thousand Oaks which had a Platinum SuperCrew listed for $145,309, or over 50% more than the MSRP.
One month later and that same electric truck (same VIN) is still available, and now with a more modest markup of around $5,000. That difference could also be attributed to dealer installed accessories, so the market adjustment may have been removed entirely.
It is unclear if after our report Ford took action and asked the dealer to remove the market adjustment, but what we do know is that no one was willing to pay that exorbitant price.
In January Ford’s Vice President of Sales, US & Canada Andrew Frick sent a letter to their dealer network after being made aware of a “limited number of dealerships interacting with customers in a manner that is negatively impacting customer satisfaction and damaging to the Ford Motor Company brand and Dealer Body reputation.”
This was before the truck was available, so the bad behaviour was limited to dealerships demanding extra payments from customers to make sure they received a truck in one of the first shipments.
One could definitely argue that these market adjustments is something that is damaging to the brand, especially ones that double the price of the vehicle.
