Ford GT Production Increasing Again

0 0 Editorial Team October 21, 2018 Edit this post

© Motor Trend Staff
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From Motor Trend

The good news: 350 more customers can buy a Ford GT supercar with the announcement today that production will be extended another two years to build 1,350 cars through 2022. The bad news: If you thought you had one of the sold-out total run of 1,000, your exclusivity factor took a small hit.

Order banks for the additional 350 units, to be built between 2020 and 2022, will open November 8 for the U.S. and select markets around the world. The order window will remain open for 30 days, said Hermann Salenbauch, Ford Performance director. New would-be owners can apply to FordGT.com, and those who applied before can re-submit. The successful applicants will hear back in the first quarter of 2019.

This summer Ford announced another GT Heritage Edition for the 2019 model year for those who want something more than the $500,000 base model. It wears Gulf Oil livery to pay homage to the GT40s that swept Le Mans from 1966 to 1969.

Ford has built 300 GTs to date, notable for its carbon fiber body and twin-turbo 3.5-liter V-6 engine. Production began in December 2016. Only 141 were built in the first year with some ramp-up and growing pains with Multimatic, the Canadian carbon fiber specialist that is making the vehicles. The bugs have been worked out, and the Markham, Ontario, plant is now making one a day or 250 a year, Salenbauch said. "We anticipated it would be faster but this year is very stable," he said.

When the car was first unveiled, the plan was to make 250 a year for two years, but by August 2016 the automaker said it would extend production to four years and double the output to 1,000 vehicles. That now creeps up to 1,350—still far shy of the 6,500 who expressed initial interest in 2016. Salenbauch said the increases don't hurt exclusivity, but at least one owner reacted to the news with dismay on Thursday.

Ford Performance is in the midst of delivering on its promise of 12 new performance vehicles by 2020. In addition to GT, there is the GT350 and the pending GT500. There is the F-150 Raptor for North America and the Ranger Raptor for the rest of the world. There are still no plans to offer the Ranger Raptor in the U.S. where F-150 Raptors turn in 20 days or less, Salenbauch says.

Performance is good business for Ford, which had only a few offerings and 133,000 annual sales in 2013. It has increased that 70 percent to 205,000 annual sales today with a far more robust lineup that will continue to grow.

The Ford Edge ST is a new addition to the stable, and a Ford Explorer ST will follow next year.

All these vehicles create a halo for the brand, Salenbauch said.