We applied to buy a $400,000 Ford GT, and here's what we learned

We applied to buy a $400,000 Ford GT, and here's what we learned

We applied to buy a $400,000 Ford GT, and here's what we learned, Selling a six-figure supercar is a lot like alongside parking a six-figure supercar: Both crave a able blow and a little bit of luck.

By design, assembly for these machines never meets demand, so there is about consistently a surplus of ambitious buyers. The carbon-veined cars are about business exercises—howling 200 mile-per-hour billboards—so Ford doesn’t wish them traveling to just anyone.

That’s why the aggregation began demography applications online this morning to buy its 2017 GT supercar. That’s right, the action of plunking down $400,000 on a Ford is not clashing applying for a barista job at Starbucks.

There are decidedly added accessible positions at Starbucks, however, than there anytime will be Ford GTs. The company, which pulled the awning off the car in 2015, expects to accomplish just 300 over the next two years.

It's difficult to enlarge how aflame car enthusiasts are about this machine. Ford rarely makes a bona fide racecar. If it does, the aggregation resurrects the GT moniker from its brightest moment: if it apprenticed to exhausted Ferrari at Le Mans in the 1960s and promptly did just that—four years in a row.

Ferrari, which makes about 7,000 cars a year, has the industry’s a lot of belled and cabalistic screening system. The aggregation and its dealers about advance a arrangement of rolling cat-and-mouse lists. Preference is accustomed to those who already own one of its cars or at atomic accord to a Ferrari club. Interested drivers are generally encouraged to buy a acclimated Ferrari afore accepting a able at a new one. Flipping a car gets you blacklisted for life.

As in any blood business, net account is alone a prerequisite for Ferrari ownership: Commitment and breeding are the alone accurate considerations.

Ford’s application, however, is refreshingly different. It appears to accord antecedence to Ford fans, accurately those who excel at amusing media. Early on, the certificate asks if the appellant owns a Ford, uses Ford cars in a business, or supports Ford-affiliated charities.

Then the aggregation gets down to marketing. It prompts: “Briefly call your role as a accessible influencer” and asks for online profiles, blog posts, videos, and specifics on “your admirers demographics.” Ford goes a footfall further, bidding applicants to accurate why they would be “a acceptable Ford GT owner” in a 60-second video acquaint on a public-facing website such as YouTube or Vimeo.

Neither age nor assets is mentioned. While Ferrari’s arrangement is blue-blood, Ford's is about blue-collar. It’s for the Mad Max fans, not the Maranello faithful. In added words, it's acquainted for humans who ability buy a added banal Ford, a approved car with far beneath than 600 horsepower. After all, that's the accomplished point of authoritative something like the GT.

And of course, the accomplished appliance exercise is pumping a accumulation of chargeless agreeable into Ford’s own business machine. In the "Terms and conditions" accomplished print, the aggregation addendum that applicants may be asked to participate in promotional activities.

In the argument box larboard at the basal for added arguments, we fabricated our final case for ownership: We apprenticed never to buy a Ferrari.

What happens if we win? We’ll achieve for $450,000 … from able buyers, of course.

This bodes able-bodied for us!

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