Beamer wrote on Sep 12, 2011, 14:19:
Do you really think that Ford many any real profit on a car that sold under 700 per year?
No, but that was largely due to Ford's lack of dealer price control, not because "Hey, I know, we're going to re-birth a legend so we can sell more Focuses." Are you not familiar with the Coletti years at SVT? It certainly seems that you aren't.
Ford stated that the GT had an MSRP of 150K. Dealers often marked them up to 250K or more. This dropped their market to ~10% of what it could have been.
You're also forgetting that during Bill Ford's reign, he wanted to get Ford back in to racing other than rednecks turning left for 2 hours on a Sunday. The idea was for Ford to go to Le Mans with an LMP1 Ford "GT" and then branch out in to FIA GT (which did happen) and other GT series (ALMS and Rolex come to mind).
I would agree that the "Terminator" Cobra of 03 and 04 were built expressly to sell more GTs given that the GT body style of those years was very long and tooth and sales had slumped. They needed a stop gap measure between that body style and the "retro" boat they were going to introduce.
Like I said, if you wanted to sell F-150s, you look at the Lightning. Ford's very, very good at marketing their cash cow vehicles and I've yet to see Ford try and cross-segment two completely separate demographics that do not share the same consumer buying trends.
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