You now have a slightly better chance of buying a Ford GT
Ford will build 350 more GT supercars than planned -- but not until 2020.
When Ford opened up applications for people who wanted to buy the new GT supercar, it received an overwhelming 6,500 entries. Which was a shame, given that Ford intended to build just 1,000 GTs over the course of four years, from December 2016 through 2020. Today, however, Ford confirmed at a presentation in Dearborn, Michigan, that it will be build a few more GTs than planned.
Great news: now you might have a shot at buying one of these. Maybe.
From 2020 to 2022, another 350 Ford GTs will roll out of the Multimatic plant in Canada that's responsible for assembling the car. That's a pretty small addition in terms of raw numbers, though a 35-percent increase in a car's production run is nothing to sniff at, especially when it's an extreme, low-volume model like the GT.
Hermann Salenbauch, Ford Performance vehicle line director, dismisses concerns that collectors will balk that their limited-edition car is now not quite so limited: "It will not take down from the exclusivity of this car," he says.
Just like the first time around, interested buyers will have to submit a lengthy application in order to be selected for a slot to buy a Ford GT . Why not simply offer up the 350 cars to some of those original applicants? "We wanted to still open it up for a few new ones," Salenbauch says. Still, prior GT applicants who resubmit their previous application will be "considered strongly."
The application process opens on Nov. 8 and will run for 30 days. If you're selected, you don't have to put down a deposit or any money to hold your spot -- but you may not receive your car until 2022. Nor will you know the price tag until you actually get to configure your car close to its build date. Ford now says that it's billing the starting as price as "near $500,000" before options.
One reason for the slow rollout is that Multimatic can only build one GT per day. The company is now on track to produce 250 GTs annually, though in the first year only 141 were built as Ford and Multimatic worked out early bugs and kinks in production. Salenbauch says that building the carbon-fiber GT is very complicated, hence the low production volumes.
