Ford warns dealers taking undue advantage of strong demand for F-150 Lightning

Ford Motor Company has issued a warning to dealerships that are taking undue advantage of the strong demand for F-150 Lightning pickup by asking the reservation holders for more money, an Electrek report stated. Some dealers have been marking up the vehicle up as much as $30,000 and even asking for bigger deposits from customers to get access to the early units.

Upon getting to know about this, Ford is now making an attempting to crack down on some of these practices. A message from Ford’s vice president of sales in the US and Canada, Andrew Frick, was leaked on the F150 Gen14 forum, the report stated. “It has come to our attention that a limited number of dealerships are interacting with customers in a manner that is negatively impacting customers and damaging to the Ford Motor Company brand and Dealer Body reputation," his warning statement read.

Frick mentioned of some dealers are demanding that customers who are already on the reservation list for the 22 MY F-150 Lightning make additional deposits or payments. “These actions are perceived as threatening customers by withholding their opportunity to convert reservations to orders," he added, saying that this goes against a clause in its dealership agreement. This could result in Ford deciding to “redirect" allocations of the F-150 Lightning to other dealers.

In the same bulletin, Ford added that its dealers can add a ‘no-sale provision’ to their contracts with F-150 Lightning buyers that would prevent them from selling their newly bought pickup truck for a year.

Demand for the F-150 Lighting pickup has been so strong that the carmaker recently announced that it will nearly double the annual production capacity of the model to 150,000 units. The union-built Ford F-150 Lightning pickup has already garnered nearly 200,000 reservations ahead of its arrival at the dealerships this spring.