Would you buy a 700-hp 2020 Ford Mustang for $40,000?
Brown Lee Ford in Tennessee is betting that the answer to that is "yes."
That old adage that horsepower sells cars is totally true. Look at cars like the Hellcat or the ZR1 Corvette or the upcoming Shelby GT500. The thing is that those cars are kind of expensive and not every geek off the street can afford them, so there's a whole network of aftermarket tuners and dealers that can fulfill your need for speed for way less than the $90,000 that a Hellcat Red Eye will set you back.
Case in point, we have Brown Lee Performance, a Ford dealer from the fine state of Tennessee which announced on Thursday that it is willing to build and sell you a 700-horsepower Ford Mustang for around $40,000. Now, here's the thing, as someone who has driven multiple cars with that kind of horsepower, I can firmly say that it's probably too much power for most people on the street -- myself included -- but that won't stop an enthusiast.
Still, Brown Lee's offer is wild enough that it got my attention, so what exactly does a 700-hp $40-grand car look like? Well, to start with, you get a 2020 Ford Mustang GT in either Grabber Lime or Twister Orange (a $495 option).
Brown Lee's road to horsepower starts with one of these bad boys: a Roush Phase 1 supercharger.
Now, consider that Ford lists the GT fastback at $36,475 before any options. If you want an automatic transmission, that adds $1,595 to the price, so we assume that the Brown Lee kit starts with a manual.
Then you add a Phase 1 Roush TVS supercharger kit, which on its own retails for $7,699. That kit includes the supercharger itself, an intake kit, an intercooler, the software to recalibrate the factory ECU, and all the hoses, belts and brackets necessary to bolt it in.
Now, Brown Lee Performance says that these modified Mustangs will retain their factory warranty and can be bought on finance and all the usual stuff you'd expect when purchasing a new car. What I can't wrap my head around is how the dealer is making any money on this deal?
Well, to start, the way Ford's dealer pricing works (or at least the way it worked when I was a Ford dealership employee so many years ago) is that the more vehicles a dealer sells and the better its customer service feedback is, the lower its pricing will be when buying stock from the manufacturer.
This means that a company like Galpin Ford in Southern California -- aka the highest-volume Ford dealer in the world -- is going to pay a lot less for its Mustang GT than a smaller dealer. It would stand to reason that Brown Lee is a relatively high-volume dealer.
Next, Brown Lee is a Roush Master Dealer, which means that it does sufficient business in selling and installing Roush performance products that it gets Roush's best pricing. So instead of paying $7,699 for a Phase 1 supercharger kit, it's probably paying around half that.
Roadshow spoke to Brown Lee's specialty vehicles manager, Brock Patterson, and learned that the dealership plans on selling around 200 Roush-modified Mustangs this year. That's not nothing, and when you consider that the $39,995 asking price doesn't include brake or suspension or wheel and tire upgrades, we'll be surprised if most of them don't roll off the lot for a lot more than that.
