Ford Is Letting Dealers Decide if F-150 Lightning Owners Can Resell Their Trucks

Image: Ford

Ford has walked backed one of its own policies. Well… sort of. Carscoops reports that the company is letting dealers decide if F-150 Lightning owners can resell their trucks within a year of ownership.

Here’s the situation. Back in January, Ford sent a bulletin out to dealers “chastising” them over typical greedy dealer shenanigans like asking for more money from customers who already reserved their truck. The company threatened to withhold Lightning allocations from these dealers.

But buried among all of this was a No-Sale provision. Similar to what Ford did with GT owners, it essentially barred owners from reselling their vehicles for a year as a way to crack down on flipping:

In order to prevent the re-sale of 22MY F150 Lightning, Ford is offering support for a No-Sale Provision to be signed by the customer at the time of purchase. Dealers may add this language to existing closing forms or create a new standalone document:

Purchaser hereby agrees that it will not sell, offer to sell, or otherwise transfer any ownership interest in the Vehicle prior to the first anniversary of the date hereof. Purchaser further agrees that Seller may seek injunctive relief to prevent the transfer of title of the Vehicle or demand payment from Purchaser of all value received as consideration for the sale or transfer.

Dealers should consult with their legal counsel to address any state-specific requirements questions. For questions, contact your Regional Manager.

While Ford drew up the language of the provision, the company left it up to dealers to decide how they wanted to implement it into sales contracts. Fast forward six months later, and things have changed. Lightnings have started to arrive in customer hands.

Trucks are already showing up for resale, often with low miles. There’s one that’s currently on Cars & Bids, and a few more have shown up on Facebook “wholesale” groups. Dealers had to have foreseen this (or are already seeing it) and don’t like it. So they contacted Ford for more control.

A Ford rep confirmed to Carscoops that the company will let dealers decide on how to approach the resell situation: “Dealers requested language from us last year about having the ability to have customers hold on to their vehicle for one year from purchase. It is up to dealers to work through local state laws should they decide to implement something between the dealer and the customer.”

What this all means is that dealers are greedy. Most people cry “capitalism!” as if that makes things OK, but it’s all just sugar-coated greed. Dealers want to be the ones to get all the profit from you before anyone else. This also shows that not all dealers are implementing this policy. This all could get pretty messy with potential owners, though, as one F-150 Lightning owner/reservation holder put it: “To be clear I do not have plans to sell but after spending 80,000 dollars on a truck to be threatened with legal action if I decide to sell is BS.”