Nowadays, car company executives figure out what’s selling and what’s not and then make fewer of the former and more of the latter. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:
There is so much buyer interest in the Ford Bronco – which isn’t electric – that Ford can’t build enough to meet demand and is actually offering people who ordered one $2,500 store credit to cancel their order in favor of something else.
Some have been waiting more than a year for a Bronco – which Ford revived for the 2021 model year (my review can be found here). It has been a hugely successful vehicle for Ford. It is – clearly – the kind of vehicle lots of people want to buy.
No subsidies – or mandates – needed.
In the old normal, Ford would build more Broncos to meet the market demand for them. The whole point of being in the car business once-upon-a-time being to sell as many vehicles as people wanted to buy. But we live in the New Abnormal. It is characterized by – among other things – the building of vehicles for which there isn’t market demand, because government requires them to be built.
Irrespective of whether they can be sold at a profit.
We all know which vehicles these are.
Two figures will make the point.
The first one is 39,458. This is the number of Mach-e “Mustangs” (my review of this one can be found here) that Ford sold last year (2022). The second number is 94,031. That is the number of Broncos Ford sold during the same time period. In other words, Ford sold more than twice as many Broncos as Mach-e “Mustangs” – and could have sold many more had there been more Broncos to sell.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 