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Ford Ranger Sales off to a Slow Start—It's Even Being Beaten by the Nissan Frontier


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We've delivered 4 Rangers in the past week to a new fleet account, 3-4 retail deliveries to customers in the past 6 weeks or so and have 3 retail orders scheduled for customers. Several of the retail orders are for SuperCab models with scheduled build dates in mid to late June! There was a lot of sticker shock initially because most of the inventory was Lariat SuperCrew's but that's changing now. We started out slow but the Ranger is now gaining momentum, slowly at first but picking up!

Edited by ice-capades
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1 hour ago, mackinaw said:

As mentioned in another thread, my local dealer (rural northern Michigan) has received only one Ranger (which is now gone).  Pretty hard to sell a truck when you have none in stock.  

You need to live near a population center. 100+ within 20 miles of me.

HRG

local inventory.JPG

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43 minutes ago, HotRunrGuy said:

You need to live near a population center. 100+ within 20 miles of me.

You're missing the point.  Rural areas, which are largely truck country, seem to have very few Rangers in stock. My local dealer probably has 30+ F-series in stock, but no Rangers.  A dealer 35 miles away has two.

And I'd rather spend 30 days in jail than to live in an urban area.

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4 hours ago, fuzzymoomoo said:

I bet if I ran the VINs on half of them they would show an "in production" status 

If you look at the trucks in the listing, I'd guess that about half of them show "dealer order" (or whatever status it is that says "the dealer has ordered it, but it's not on the lot yet"). Ford doesn't do a very good job of searching the dealers' actual inventory.

And you don't necessarily need to be near a population center, you just need to be in the right part of the country. I'm seeing them at Ford dealers around Oklahoma, and I'd bet you'll find them in stock at dealerships all over Texas, too. Heck, Whiteface Ford in Hereford has two in stock (status shows In Stock, and they're not using stock photos), and Hereford is an itty bitty town off in the far west Texas panhandle.

 

ETA: I looked at my dealer's site, and they have three status indicators; On The Lot, In Transit, and Dealer Order. The last time I searched through Ford's site, it didn't make any distinction among those statuses (stati?).

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20 hours ago, ice-capades said:

We've delivered 4 Rangers in the past week to a new fleet account, 3-4 retail deliveries to customers in the past 6 weeks or so and have 3 retail orders scheduled for customers. Several of the retail orders are for SuperCab models with scheduled build dates in mid to late June! There was a lot of sticker shock initially because most of the inventory was Lariat SuperCrew's but that's changing now. We started out slow but the Ranger is now gaining momentum, slowly at first but picking up!

Thanks for your dealer perspective ice-capades sir! That info makes me feel better as my Ranger pre-order is for an XLT SuperCab. :)

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22 hours ago, HotRunrGuy said:

You need to live near a population center. 100+ within 20 miles of me.

HRG

local inventory.JPG

There are less than 100 actually in Stock, of the 127 listed 42 have  "Dealer Ordered" That is not good inventory for a population center. 

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16 minutes ago, jasonj80 said:

There are less than 100 actually in Stock, of the 127 listed 42 have  "Dealer Ordered" That is not good inventory for a population center. 

OK, 85 in stock, spread across the 17 dealers within 20 miles, = an average of 5 per dealer.  My point to mackinaw was that higher-population areas stand a better chance of having more vehicles available.

For all we know, this is a FoMoCo allocation problem. Maybe higher-volume dealers are getting the early shipments?  Like what is being claimed that FCA is doing to DJR dealers, forcing them to take other product in order to get Gladiators?

HRG

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The complete lack of marketing in key areas like Southern California is also puzzling. Is Ford afraid people will find out they sell a Tacoma competitor?

I've seen exactly 1 Ranger in the wild since they went on sale. I see probably 2 dozen Tacoma each day. Ranger hasn't been relevant nameplate in California since when Toyota's pickup truck had no name. So the fact that Ford is essentially launching a brand new nameplate and vehicle in the biggest/most important market for midsize truck without ANY media advertising is... a bit unorthodox.

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8 hours ago, fuzzymoomoo said:

That color looks better in person than it does in the pictures. 

Like I said in the other thread, I've seen about 6-7 Rangers, including one this morning, which actually was the orange color, and it looked good.

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