If you're willing to wait, ordering a Ford EV online isn't much like buying from a dealer. They're involved, but it feels only incidentally. Of course, if you're not willing to wait, the "price" is dealer markup and the usual experience.

Ordering online doesn't guarantee you a non-dealership experience. There's no stopping them from adding a $5,000 "market adjustment" to the price of the car you ordered online 9 months prior when you go to pick it up. You cannot force them to sell it at MSRP. This has happened to people that ordered Mach-E's, multiple times.

Ford came down hard on dealers who "market adjusted" preorders, and that practice should have been halted for a while now. I think it even made HN.

If they change the price last minute can you renege on your side of the deal and get your money back and cancel?

yes but then you're out time. So they lost nothing because they can sell the car but you lost time.

This is sort point for me. I once custom ordered a BMW with the exact options I wanted. Made a downpayment. Waited 3 months for it to arrive taking the bus to work and getting rides home from friends. It arrived at the dealer and they sold it someone else and then told me I could order another if I wanted. You can probably imagine the rage I felt.

You'd have only put down a refundable deposit with Ford, which the dealership can apply to your purchase, or you can get it refunded by Ford. You have no contractual relationship with the dealer, nor any ownership interest in the car, which is why the dealership that does now own the freshly delivered car is able to demand more money for it.

Yes, the deposits are generally refundable. The dealer will take your car and sell it to someone else at $10k over MSRP. Someday when supply is less tight they won't have that leverage, but it's a seller's market right now.

Some dealers won't do this, but you'll need to put in some work to find them.

yeah but you go to the back of the line for another one at a different dealership who hopefully won't screw you.

Good question. I'm interested to know the answer as well.

sounds like enough of a reason just to buy a Tesla.

Buying a Tesla comes with its own set of problems, like the inability to test drive the car before paying for it, and some of the worst initial quality in the industry -- which means you really should want to test drive it before buying it. Once it's yours, the complete absence of an independent dealer network means you're fully at Tesla's whim for repairing those defects. They will often say "it's within spec" and refuse. Plus, "just buy a Tesla" comes with a price premium that's more than any "market adjustment" at even the shadiest dealer for most other EVs. What buyers of EVs from traditional makes are doing is keeping tabs of what dealerships are applying those underhanded markups and simply not sending their online orders there.

This was my thought as well. Tesla doesn’t have a truck. When they have a truck equivalent to the Ford Lightning it’ll be 2x as much and lack fundamental features. That alone cuts Tesla out of a huge market segment. Their sedans are barely price competitive on the low end and quality seems worse than early Hyundais. They have cool features but also seem to not be ideal vehicles by any means.

Not all dealers are doing that.

Unless Tesla has no appealing or useful options for you. If I need a little goofy sedan I might take a look at Tesla. I need trucks and real vehicles though.

Right now Tesla is coasting on VC and IPO and being early entrant innovator. The bitch slap of truth that is automotive manufacturing and marketing is about to land it's hand. Ford understands that bitch slap better than anyone.

Ford does not understand infotainment or charging experience.

Tesla literally ship with AMD Ryzen CPUs, while other manufacturers still can't even get CPUs. They got 8 cameras, 4 of which you can watch live....anytime on your mobile phone. The supercharger experience sets a standard that no 3rd party comes close to reaching. The supercharger network itself gives Tesla customers the ability to confidently travel and easily charge - fast.

I actually test drove a Mach-E and a Model Y. Ford was straight up trying to rip me off, and made the whole experience really off-putting. On top of that, the Ford dealers literally had no idea what they were doing, or any of the facts. There is no passion in it.

Tesla is all passion. Every Tesla employee wakes up to do one thing; make the world's best EV. Ford (and every other legacy) is trying to change engines in an airplane midflight while trying to learn how to build EV's.

It isn't for the lack of trying - in any area, that Tesla isn't the best at something. Tesla has the smartest people in the room/industry. Their energy and focus is on AI, scaling up manufacturing, battery tech, charging tech, etc. They spend nothing on marketing, and get more free press and word of mouth than any brand but Apple.

Marketing like legacy car companies comes off as desperate and thirsty. Just listen to the two CEO; Ford CEO will play buzzword bingo and talk high level corporate empty-speak. Elon Musk will talk to you about the challenges in battery manufacturing, the nuances of the minutia of building these amazing vehicles. Elon Musk will sleep on the factory floor to get it done. What other CEO has slept on the factory floor?

The man is not without his defects, but literally consider his life accomplishments; PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, tunnel digging because why not, solar panels, residential utility scale battery storage, 30000 "gas stations" around the world.

Literally Ford can't even build vehicles right now. Like production down. Assembly stopped. Tesla is pumping out EV faster than ever before. And Elon Musk is trying to fly rockets to Mars in his spare time.

I respect the history of the legacy's; but they are simply not in a strong position. Musk won. His cars are the cool ones everyone wants.

It isn't that Ford has crazy demand; they have no production. Same as Rivian, etc. It markets well to say Ford/Rivian deliveries of EV are way out to 2024 - but has to be taken in context that they are struggling to produce 50k EV a year.

Tesla has the proven product. Literally no one knows how well a Rivian or Lucid will hold up, or what defects will haunt their early buyers. There isn't enough data out there yet. Same for the Mach-E. Tesla has 10yrs of data for customers to look at; and Tesla has what feels like a 100yr head start...

>> The man is not without his defects, but literally consider his life accomplishments; PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, tunnel digging because why not, solar panels, residential utility scale battery storage, 30000 "gas stations" around the world.

So, let's check list, shall we?

Paypal, wasn't him (at least not even close to the level of what people think)

Tesla, there Elon had to sue to get the title of founder

SpaceX, at least as much Shotwell than him

Tunnel digging, well ever herd of subways?

Solar panels and residential solar, one isn't even noticeable in terms of market share, the other had to be bailed out by Tesla (did I mention some strange corporate governance and financial links between tesla and SpaceX around that time? And that the bailed solar company was owned by his cousin?)

30k "gas stations, impressive... Just ask BP or Exxon how many they have. Credit where credit is due so, Tesla did build the first true charging network. The first, not the only one.

And let's not pretend SpaceX will be the first to reach Mars.

> SpaceX, at least as much Shotwell than him

SpaceX without Elon would still have been SpaceX, SpaceX without Gwynne Shotwell would have been another Blue Origin.

This reads like bad ad copy or like an adolescent is writing a paper while binging on sugar.

Do you work for Tesla, are you a shareholder, or just really into the company?

This was not my experience. I put a reservation down on a F150 Lightning, and a few hours later I got a phone call on my cell phone from a pushy sales person at the dealership, trying to convince me to choose something that's available now rather than waiting.

I ended up canceling my reservation.

You still get the markup, Tesla just does it directly.

That’s a good thing. Buyers are able to know the exact price without having to waste hours driving to a dealership and haggling.

>> You still get the markup, Tesla just does it directly.

> That’s a good thing. Buyers are able to know the exact price without having to waste hours driving to a dealership and haggling.

Your comment doesn't address the point about markup at all. Knowing an "exact" with a higher markup doesn't seem live much of a good thing to me.

At the very least, its better if the excess markup goes to the entity which can reinvest that into additional production to eventually saturate demand, rather than a middleman who adds no value but collects rent on regulatory capture (see: Texas laws banning non-dealerships like Tesla from selling cars unless they allow local rich families in the state to collect their rent)

> At the very least, its better if the excess markup goes to the entity which can reinvest that into additional production to eventually saturate demand, rather than a middleman who adds no value but collects rent on regulatory capture (see: Texas laws banning non-dealerships like Tesla from selling cars unless they allow local rich families in the state to collect their rent)

I'm not so sure. You're giving a rather tendentious account of the practice, and I'm pretty skeptical of handwaving "regulatory capture" as justification to get rid of regulation some corporation dislikes. As far as I understand, the dealership system was meant to engineer more competition into the auto market [1], and frankly I prefer something like that than giving more control to larger companies.

[1] And that passes the smell test, at least. A dealership is buying in bulk and can probably be assumed to be more savvy in negotiating with the manufacturer than a private consumer. And putting those dealerships in competition with each other should put downward pressure on prices.

You're basically asking: Does the dealer's negotiation reduce prices to consumers more than their cuts increase it. I don't think so, at least not for Tesla.

I'm pretty pessimistic on this. For one, middlemen traditionally increase costs, due to the reduction in inefficiency and well, their cut. Furthermore there already exists a competition layer at the manufacturer level.

In the supply constrained world, this is even more so, as middleman will happily arbitrage prices upwards (see GPU scalpers), meaning that they get to extract value, while providing minimal service of their own.

> You're basically asking: Does the dealer's negotiation reduce prices to consumers more than their cuts increase it. I don't think so, at least not for Tesla.

What do you mean "at least not for Tesla." Don't they famously lack dealers, so there's no point of comparison for them?

> as middleman will happily arbitrage prices upwards (see GPU scalpers)

That's certainly true for some middlemen, but I don't think that can be generalized into a rule. Naively, some people think that everyone in a market should act like price gougers, but that's obviously not true, and I don't think the the reason is that there's something special about being the original manufacturer.

My mental image of Tesla was that it was supply constrained. This argument probably doesn't apply if this has changed. However, if the assumptions hold, then traditionally middlemen arbitrage prices upwards in times of scarcity.

Or perhaps I'm just bitter about the GPU shortages, who knows.

But you still know what price you're going to pay ahead of time.

With dealers anymore, they make you hustle to get some of that markup knocked off, then once you think the negotiation is over, you're tossed into the next stage of the negotiation gauntlet.

I'd rather know up front that I'm going to pay $50,000 for a vehicle, rather than think I'm going to pay $40,000, then upon arriving at the dealership, find out the market price is $55,000, which goes down to $45,000 after negotiation, and after all that, have to deal with finance secretly adding $10k in options and fucking around with interest rates.

With Tesla you pay MSRP. With any other car you pay MSRP plus whatever the dealer wants to charge. I sincerely doubt that OP was referring to MSRP profit margin.

> With any other car you pay MSRP plus whatever the dealer wants to charge.

That's obviously not true. I've never paid MSRP for a car and I've never bought a Tesla.

With Teslas, you pay MSRP. With any other car you pay whatever the dealer wants to charge, which is usually dealer cost plus some markup, which is usually less than MSRP. On some rare occasions you can even buy a car for at or below dealer cost.

>That's obviously not true. I've never paid MSRP for a car and I've never bought a Tesla.

You obviously haven't tried to buy a car during the pandemic.

This seems good for Ford not necessarily good for prices. A customer order is lower cost to the manufacturer and dealer as the vehicle doesn't need to be in inventory.

Thus, you can sometimes get a lower price by ordering from the factory (dealer is passing along this savings) than buying from inventory. Not to mention this also eliminates price competition amongst dealers. Some dealers take a loss on sales to earn manufacturer incentives.

Service however is where they make money, and as time progresses and cars are more software based and self-repair becomes impossible - total cost of ownership goes up.

This is a good point. Service costs for Teslas are outrageous. Though, to be fair, Teslas appear to require far less servicing. Because of this, I've seen estimates that they actually end up costing around the same as gas cars, annualised. People are going to have to think very hard about the servicing costs when they purchase cars in future, because that cost is often extremely opaque. I don't have much faith that the average consumer will consider this at all. If so, it's very easy to imagine a future in which the upfront cost of EVs is below manufacturing cost, but the ongoing subscriptions and servicing are where manufacturers make their profit.

Tesla's no-dealership model has been an unmitigated disaster. I have never heard of any other company making people wait months for repairs, nor have I heard of any other company repeatedly making delivery estimates that are wrong by months, nor have I heard of any other company delivering cars over a year after they were paid for.

Is the model a disaster, or is Tesla's implementation of it a disaster? Or is Tesla's implementation of it given the confines they were working under a disaster? If you look at Rivian and Lucid, their performance in this space hasn't exactly been stellar either.

You are absolutely correct that these things typically do not happen with the major car manufacturers, and that Tesla needs to get its act together. But it is worth considering the other car manufacturers have been doing it at scale for a much longer time often with better understood materials and technology.

People often ask "What are the other carmakers going to do to compete?" and this is exactly one of those things that they'll bring to the table.

Weird I got my Tesla within a month delivered to my place. Looks great and drives great no issues so far. Definitely prefer this to going into a dealership.

Alternatively, you don't have a listing on Tesla's site saying that a car costs $40k, and then when you call them up to buy it, they say they are adding a "$25k dealer premium", so you can have it for $65k. That's what actually happened to me when I was about to buy a rav4 prime a year ago. So instead I just went and bought a model Y for $50k, and am extremely happy with it. And also blacklisted Larry H Miller from ever getting my business again. But I guess I haven't had to deal with repairs, so maybe things will get worse.

Everyone is different, I guess. I loved the experience. Placed the order, got an email, set up the bank transfer, they called me exactly one time to confirm the delivery time, then dropped off the car. I spent less time[1] buying my Model Y than I have on some products from Amazon.

The opinion and memery about this brand is just unbelievable. Cars are big and complicated devices and selling them is equally complicated, and I'm sure there are people who have bad experience buying them, as is basically inevitable. But the overwhelming majority of owners think it's great.

[1] If you don't count the incessant, obsessive checking to see what the current delivery estimate is, of course.

>But the overwhelming majority of owners think it's great.

I don't care at all what the overwhelming majority of owners think. Maybe 95% of customers are happy to have saved a few hours in a dealership, but when the 5% are without a car for six months that's pretty cold comfort.

The problems I am discussing are very serious. It is not enough for them to be uncommon; they must be unheard of.

Compare that to the competition: - No one I know likes going to the dealership.. so that's close to a 100% dissatisfaction rate for a dealership experience, compared to 5% for Tesla.

No one I know likes wearing a seatbelt.

> I have never heard of any other company making people wait months for repairs,

This is sadly quite common right now. If you own any vehicle with Tesla production levels, it's possible there's a shortage of certain parts for it.