A Tale of Mine
I am going to do a little something different this morning. I am going to tell a tale of mine that if you read to the end, a business point will be made.
My tale is about everyone’s love for the automobile. I have had many cars in my lifetime. Some hits, some misses but for the most part I love my cars. I may not keep them as clean as some OCD guy but that doesn’t mean I love them any less. They are a reflection of me I am sure.
So the tale goes something like this: I drive a Toyota Tundra pickup. I love this truck. I love driving it. I love the fact that it is a Toyota and will probably outlive us all. I cannot park said truck. While my love for this truck is strong, I do see it is getting on in years and I do see that it still has some pretty good value left in it. In the pandemic, it was appraised at like 400,000 dollars and 60 acres with a mule in Iowa. Now that Biden has cured the pandemic, it is roughly 28K. Still very good resale.
With all that in mind, I have been looking for a new car or truck to replace my beloved Tundra. I settled on putting a deposit down on the Ford F150 Lightning. Their breakthrough electric vehicle. Looked great in the advertisements. Plus it had enough power to light up a small village for like 4 months, so I put a $100 dollar deposit down on the vehicle in mid 2021. Get in line they said, I did. I was 189,900 on the list. Chances are I would not get one in 2022 but maybe early 2023. No problem I thought since my Tundra was going strong. I will wait.
Before I go any further I think it prudent to give the readers a little background on my electric car experiences.
To start with, I was number 890 on Tesla’s list for it’s first electric car. I put down a $5,000 deposit down on Elon’s dream. The car was scheduled to come in at around 54,000 dollars. Ok. Sounds good, I can afford that. That day comes. I get the email. “It’s your turn to order your new experience”, the email said. Ok, log on, link in. I am good to go.
“Configure your car here” Easy peasy: Color? Black done. What size tires? what? Hold the phone skippy. Every choice cost something. There was no “Standard” Ok, I’ll order the 20”tires with nice rims. 3,200 bucks!! Let me scale down, 19” tires with meh rims, 2700 bucks. Ok, move on I say. Interior. Not many choices and again there was a cost associated with whatever choice. Same with the instrument cluster and controls. So with this a’ la carte BS the car came to over 70K. No thanks. I called Tesla and after going through 300 plus prompts and begging for a “Reprasentitive!!!” I finally got some humanoid on the phone and let her know my displeasure. I said I will supply my own tires and get seats from a junk yard. No can do dude. I asked for my money back. Surprisingly, it was credited back to my credit card within a couple of hours.
Next. I saw an ad in a local paper for a BMW I3 for 189 a month. Electric car, 189 a month, I am there! I go to the dealership, they say the car has been sold already and if you look at the ad it had the exact VIN number of a vehicle. I called them on it. I said I wanted to see the bill of sale on that particular vehicle because I think you and your “Manager” are lying. He could not produce said bill of sale, something about privacy concerns so I told the young buck of a salesman to go tell his “manager” that I wanted the exact same car at that exact same price, they advertised it, they should be able to produce it. He disappears and says they found the exact same car in Maryland. I’ll take it. I can honestly say that that car was worth every penny. It was so much fun to drive and I had a charger installed in my garage so I never had to hunt for a charger. It went from 0-85 (its top speed) in like 2.2 seconds and it handled great. True, when the temperature dipped below 32 I think my range was 26 miles but so what, it was my station car. I called BMW finance at the end of the lease and I wanted to extend the lease and was told that my new lease would be 490 a month. I said no, I want 189 a month. They said the lease rate is determined by the residual on the car and the residual was very high because of your super cheap original lease rate. I said no thanks and inform the person on the phone that with all the new EV’s out there they would have a very hard time leasing that car at that rate and/or selling it for the residual. A year later the car was still in the lot.
With that positive experience driving an electric car I wanted another. Here comes the Rivian. Wow! Their initial price point as a standard truck was somewhere around 59K. Ok, I can do that. $100 deposit on the way. The more I saw of it the more I loved it. Then the price point started changing. The more the price point changed, the more I said I don’t like where this is going. The more I felt that, the more I wanted to get my money back. I did. I see them occaisionaly and I have talked with an owner and he said he has no complaints about anything regarding the truck itself. He just thought the pricing was a little suspect. Every time a storm front came through the price went up. He paid almost 95K for it.
In the attempt to save some time, I will admit I have had deposits down on almost every newfangled EV to be mentioned. GMC, Volvo, etc. It was all about initial pricing as opposed to the actual drive it off the lot cost.
Right now, I have a deposit down on a Fisker Ocean and the F-150 Lightning.
And my patience with Ford has grown very thin.
I originally picked the Lariat edition which initially was priced at 47,000 with no options and mine tricked out would have been around 54,000 the way I wanted it. However, Ford, seeing an opportunity and with this horrible inflation found it convenient to raise the price on this truck four times and just priced me out of the market. And the dealers, bless their hearts, will tack on additional costs as they see fit. So, you are now going to pay over 70,000 for the truck that loaded was 54,000 and the dealerships want to tack on anywhere from 3,500 dollars to 15,000 dollars. No thanks.
The excuses are pretty consistent. The cost of materials has gone way up. Ok, I will buy that to a point. It just seems unusual when Tesla is lowering prices and other EV manufacturers are holding the line on pricing, Ford is experiencing rising costs. The prices of the three main components of electric batteries have come down by an average of 18% in the last two months. Yet, Ford is somehow paying more.
Ok. I think as a society, Americans are pretty stupid. I will include myself in that as well. Yet, I don’t think we are stupid enough to believe Ford’s reasoning. Why don’t they just say it. We have two models that are selling well. We are going to bend every potential customer over a barrel and ram it so hard for as long as we can because it really is our only chance in this decade to make money. That is the honest truth about Ford.
As a kid growing up Ford meant one of two things, Fix Or Repair Daily or Found On Road Dead. They produce crappy cars and tried to compete with GM but just couldn’t do it. The only vehicle that they ever produced of any lasting value was the F150 Truck. The whole company rode on the back of that one vehicle for decades. Now they have the Bronco and the Lightning and they are going to squeeze every existing penny out of consumers and when that ride ends, there will be so many people with an incredibly bad taste in their mouths that they will never buy a Ford vehicle as long as they live (I will run for President of that club).
If you look at the stock over the decades, it is apparent no one actually cares about investing in this company. The stock languishes at certain levels and never goes anywhere. I remember being in Ford on the NYSE floor and it was trading at 11 dollars. In 1996! Today, it trades at 12 dollars for a reason.
The moral of this story is many fold. One, until there is a functioning consistency to pricing EVs, they will struggle to get to the point that the Climate Crisis Crazies want. Two, Ford’s abhorrent approach to their customers will backfire to the point that shareholders will beg for a 12 dollar exit point. Three, Do not follow my lead in buying a car.
I am still waiting on my Fisker and Ford said my refund will be credited back to my card in 7 to 10 business days. Even that they are trying to squeeze every last cent!