[Martinjlm]

Originally Posted by Iron Lung Jimmy

But Ford can't sell what it does produce.

As per the sales manager at a fairly large dealership, the Mach-E is a very hard sell and nobody even wants to look at a Lightning.

Also a quick story... Ford has Mach-E's stacked up so the owner of the dealership buys 20. Staff is like WTF are you doing, we will never sell these!!! Owner then incentivizes staff to buy one with, essentially, whatever it takes to get them to do it. Reason? On the surface to be familiar with EV's to better be able to sell them but I suspect the end game is simply to curry favor with Ford. Result? Ford counts 20 EV sales... but they weren't really legit.

I’ve been trying for months to figure out how Ford allowed themselves to land in this situation. The best I can come up with is maybe they have supply agreements that might force them to reimburse key component systems suppliers for bespoke tooling should volume fall below a specific threshold. I’ve seen this type of agreement for critical components where suppliers are responsible to acquire specialized equipment that can only be used for specific parts. For example, I expect the supplier of the frunk tub may have a ridiculous amount of capital involved in the molding equipment to make that part. If I were the business supplying this part, I would negotiate volume triggers that basically say “you fall below this volume and you buy my tooling and also the piece cost goes from “$X” to 1.75X”. Extend this over multiple components and suppliers. Ford may have been betting that holding high inventory for a short period of time would be economically wiser than just buying out the tooling and paying higher piece costs. I could be wrong.