Resource for Auto News and Information
July 8, 2005

                             Ford Decides to keep up with the Jones’s

   Since June 1 GM has been selling almost all of their vehicles at special prices under a plan which promised employee discount pricing for everyone. Their motto was “You pay what we pay”. Although a couple of cars were left out, you wouldn’t have noticed if you had visited a dealer during the sale. The sale was supposed to last till July 4 but GM decided to extent the sale till August 1 do to its success. GM’s sales numbers were up about 41% and that was during a period of new car saturation. Summer has traditionally been the season for deep vehicle price discounts but what makes this sell different was that all customers were included. Typically in the past dealers were eager to move the old cars off the lot so dealers would show some kind of discount on almost every automobile they sell during the summer. However, that is not to say that some aggressive customers didn’t get those same prices earlier in the year. With the employee pricing every car buyer can fall asleep at night knowing his price was not an unfair one.

   Ford felt they had to match GM’s offer or lose a whole summers worth of American car buyers to GM. Chrysler has their own sale planned that will also be employee discount price based. All three have said their sales will last till August 1, 2005. Last month both Ford and Chrysler had flat sales while GM was selling cars left and right. This month we can predict that Ford and Chrysler will have a better month then GM because their buyers have been waiting for their turn. As a customer you can expect to save about 10-15% with these incentive programs, with many of the rebates still being offered, your overall discount can really add up.

  It’s no wonder this sale has been a huge success for GM. Even more then buying new cars people like to feel they got a good deal. There is nothing worse then bragging at a dinner party that you saved $4,000 on a Lexus demo only to have someone else mention that they saved $5,000 and got the same one brand new three days later. What the employee pricing programs do is it allows for a guiltless buying experience because, you don’t feel bad about buying a $40,000 car as long as you know it really is worth $40,000.

 Now that GM has pulled all the tricks they can to sell vehicles expect demand to seriously taper off unless GM changes their car pricing policy. Sure the new cars will be here in October, but won’t those new auto buyers start thinking maybe I should hold off till summer when they do that employee pricing thing again.

- Auto-Car-Transport .com