FORD Warns: The Economy IS BREAKING

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]So, we just got sales numbers out of Ford and things do not look good. More and more cracks are starting to show themselves in the car market and right now Ford is screaming it. Decreases right now in companies like Ford are causing them to take drastic steps to change the way that they're operating.

[00:00:13]Right now, sales at Ford right now are so bad that they're about to dramatically cut their prices so they can incentivize people to actually buy their junk. So, Ford is uh starting a new program now where they're going to actually roll out employee pricing to all their customers. So, if you go into a Ford dealership, you're going to be able to get the same pricing that a Ford employee is going to get. Now, they did this last year around the same same time period and actually was really good for sales. It it boosted uh a lot of their truck sales. And the slogan that they're having, they're putting on it uh this year is American value for American values. And this feels kind of like a slap in the face because if you go to a Ford lot, what are you seeing? Well, you're seeing 80, 90, $100,000 trucks, and they're labeling this as you can go and buy one of these $80,000 trucks.

[00:01:04]Now, you're getting employee pricing.

[00:01:06]So, instead of $80,000 MSRP, maybe it's $75, $76,000 for this F-150. But because you're American and we have American values, we're going to give you a American value in this $75,000 F-150.

[00:01:21]Feels kind of off, right? So, uh, anyway, well, here's the thing that we have to dig into this. If we have a Ford company, if we have Ford dealers that are doing a really good job actually moving a lot of these vehicles, if we're not in trouble right now, because remember, at the end of the day, what does Ford care about? What do all these car manufacturers care about?

[00:01:42]Money, right? They're they're shareholders. They want their stock price to go up. So if they are doing so well, they're not going to put on incentives like employee pricing for everyone and they know that this incentive will actually work and work pretty well. They did it last year and it worked. So we just got numbers out of Ford and they are not good. Now we have April sales that are down 14.4% year-over-year, but we have to you have to look back a year and see what was actually going on so we can actually really define what these numbers mean.

[00:02:14]See, so last year around the same time of year, well, we had a lot of FOMO that was going on in the car market because we had the threat of tariffs. We had tariffs that were coming in to the system from this administration and people were trying to buy vehicles and buy brand new vehicles ahead of all these tariffs that were going to be put in place. And we even had a lot of dealerships, a lot of salespeople scaring a lot of potential buyers, saying, "Okay, well, these tariffs are going to come in the system and car prices are going to go up by 50%. This was actually some of the tactics that these very shady, very very shady uh used car, new car salesmen, uh these these franchise dealers were actually using to try to get people to buy cars and buy them right now. We all knew, especially if you watch this channel, if you actually looked at what's was going on in the system, that car prices were not going to do that overnight. But this was a lot of the things that were happening in the market and dealerships were taking advantage of people who didn't know what was actually going to be happening. But so that was happening last year this time of year. And uh so that 14% number doesn't really scare me all that much. The number that does scare me is that this is marked now the fourth month in a row of sales declines for Ford. And this I think is more concerning than a decline year-over-year. just because there was a lot of FOMO in the market and uh there were there should have been more cars that were sold over that time period last year. Even a car dealer like myself, we were busier last year because people were scared about the price of used cars going up just because of an effect of what the new car market would do. Um so that's that in itself that one particular number not so worrisome. But if we look at the entire picture and we see that month after month after month after month, Ford sales are getting worse and worse and worse. And this is this is including like spring selling season. January should not be better than right now. Spring selling season is a hot time for car manufacturers, for these new car dealers, and for used car dealers like myself. But if you have declines from January to February to March to April, that is a terrible setup for Ford dealers. That's a terrible, terrible setup for Ford, the company.

[00:04:29]So, the numbers for Ford's quarter actually looked very, very bad. We have for the quarter a 9% decline in sales.

[00:04:37]But here's the thing. The actual overall numbers when they reported their earnings didn't look all that bad. And the the thing about it is we got a reimbursement for tariffs of $1.3 billion to Ford. So, here's here's the problem I have with all this. Well, see, okay, Ford has to pay tariffs to produce these vehicles, right? They did that over the last the last year. Ford then passes a lot of those cost on to their customer. We see this with outrageous MSRPs on all these vehicles and then you see other manufacturers like uh Stalantis and you see GM, I've even pointed this out in some of the videos where their destination fees went up.

[00:05:18]This is the fee that these manufacturers charge to get their vehicles from the manufacturing plant to the dealerships.

[00:05:26]And on GM side, I believe that the price went up by like 600 bucks per each one of these trucks. Now, their cost to actually deliver these vehicles. This was way back before the price of gas uh uh spiked. This was before all the war that we have been dealing with with all the price increases that are surrounding our fuel. the $600 increase on the destination fee happened well before that. And so we know that the destination fee, the actual cost, the pricing of them having to get a vehicle from the manufacturing plant to their dealership did not go up by that amount.

[00:06:00]So, in a lot of cases, a lot of these manufacturers, what they did was they baked in some other fee somewhere else and just named it something other than a tariff fee because they didn't want to be in the the bad graces of this administration, right? Administration said, "Okay, well, we're going to have tariffs. We're going to charge all these other countries for all this money, and it's not going to hit you as a consumer." Right? Turns out it does, but the manufacturers don't want to name it that because they still want this administration to see them as not a threat to the popularity of what's going on. You know, I'm not getting into politics, but you hear what I'm saying.

[00:06:38]Uh but so we're going through this uh this time period where okay, these manufacturers, they got charged a lot or it cost them a lot more to produce their product because of tariffs. Just how tariffs work. price of of goods to be shipped and the taxes that you have to pay on it goes up, cost per goods go up.

[00:06:57]They pass that on to the consumer. Now, because tariffs were ruled illegal.

[00:07:02]Well, what happens? Well, now the government has to pay back a lot of these manufacturers a lot of money. Ford just got $1.3 billion. But now, what's going to go happen going forward? Is Ford now going to distribute that money to the customers that they actually upcharged because they had to pay more to produce? No. No. Ford's going to keep all that money. And now going forward from here, a company like GM, a company like Stellantis, a company like Ford, well, the added fees, the added cost, the added price points that they they increased on a consumer like you, well, it went up because of tariffs. But now, are they going to lower it back down because now they don't have to pay the tariffs or the tariffs are less or they're getting reimbursements because of the tariffs?

[00:07:48]No. If you would pay it back then, well, you probably will still pay it now. So, as the American public, we get to pay the higher prices, but we also don't get to enjoy in these uh tariff reimbursements. So, so this is a thing uh going forward that I see as uh as something that's going to be the norm across a lot of these manufacturers where okay, even though the tariffs have to come off, even though we get reimbursements from the government to a lot of these manufacturing companies, customer the customer is not going to be able to benefit in any of this. And this is the part of inflation that you you don't hear a lot when uh when you're hearing things from an in administration that's that's talking about tariffs when you're hearing about gas prices going up. When you hear about your just random fees that are getting tacked on that are being called something else. In this specific case GM with their destination fee. This is called sticky inflation.

[00:08:45]And what happens in these cases is that okay, we might have a one-time price increase because of something that happens that is outside of the control of these manufacturers. In this case, tariffs. They raise the price because of this. They figure out that their consumers will actually pay the increased price, but then that's uh that amount comes off, but because they know that the consumers are still going to pay it, they still know that that Ford still knows that they can sell $75,000 trucks to somebody. Somebody's still buying them. Dealerships are still taking them. We're still selling them.

[00:09:18]So even though our input cost is going down, why would we lower our co Why would we lower our prices when people are still paying it? That's very sticky.

[00:09:26]So I can relate this incentive program that they're providing to their consumers right now. Similarly to really how I run my business. Now I'm a I'm a small used car dealer. I sell cars that are $5,000 and under. And when I want to move more product, when I want to sell more cars, when we've been slower, well, what do we do? Well, I cut all my prices by about $500 across the board to try to sell them. And if they don't sell at that price point, wait two weeks, we cut them again by another $500. I lower prices when I need to sell more cars.

[00:09:57]This is exactly what Ford is trying to do right now. This is uh some of the worry, some of the scare that we're seeing from a lot of these manufacturers. We know slow times are here. know that uh most likely slow times are going to continue. So we need to we need to rustle up some sales and the way to do that lower some prices, give some incentives to consumers to actually buy their vehicles. And in an area where we can name Ford, the don't get right brand of all the brands, we have more recalls, right? So, we have um 180,000 Broncos and Raptors that are being recalled right now because they have uh bolts in their seats that are actually coming loose and they can fail during a crash. This is a serious serious safety concern. It seems like every time you can do it yourself, go to Google, type in Ford recalls, and you can just look at the latest news and it seems like on a weekly basis, I see Ford new articles every single week of hundreds of thousands of Fords being recalled all the time. And here's the it's got to tarnish the brand, right?

[00:10:57]Where you have these Ford trucks, you have the Broncos, you have uh like even some of the Raptors, you have you have the Rangers now that that are continuously get recalled. And it's not just Ford. Stalantis has a problem. GM has a problem. Imploding motors, it's a common place around the car market right now. The quality of vehicles continues to go down and down and down and down.

[00:11:19]Recalls continue to go up and up and up and up. And it really at the end of the day cost these manufacturers so much money. And if they would put a little bit of that money in the front end to a lot more of their research and development and their testing, then they could probably fix a lot of these problems. But what do they do? No, let's put it together with some duct tape and some zit tiles and send it out. Let's just send it out and we'll fix it after we sell it. The Ford Pro division, the commercial division, uh them actually selling vehicles to companies continues to be strong. So, that's a bid to say that, okay, maybe things aren't as bad as we continue to see across the economy. Um, I would wager that companies just have money and they're still willing to spend it. And even though it seems like things are starting to uh to tighten up, or it could be that this that quality issue that I talked about earlier, maybe uh maybe a lot of these fleet companies are running through a lot of their products uh a lot faster than uh than what we used to.

[00:12:13]That's all that's all speculation at this point. We know that these recalls have been a problem. These a lot of this quality has been an absolute issue and commercial vehicles are going to get beat to crap. Every any of these uh these companies that are actually buying these vehicles. So that could be have something to to do with it. But one thing that Ford and a lot of these manufacturers especially the US brands are really counting on is that the economy continues to roll that companies continue to spend money. But if we see any kind of slowdown that happens more in our economy than what we're seeing right now, then you could see a lot of these companies stop buying a lot of this product and when they stop buying a lot of these fleet vehicles, well, that's the one thing right now that's keeping forward GM Stantis really buoied here in this market and it's something that they count on to make their money quarter after quarter after quarter. And if that goes if that goes is big time problems cuz we already know, we already know retail's suffering right now. All right, so now we got some uh EV numbers out of Ford that are that are laughable uh to say the least. But I just going to go through them real quick. Don't really care, but we'll talk about that market just a little bit. Um EV sales down 25% uh just in April alone. Uh hybrids, hybrids, which I mean there's this was supposed to be the big middle ground between the transition between gas and EVs, except on Ford's side, we have a decrease of 32%. That was a number that actually surprised me where their uh their overall sales are down but their hybrid individually their hybrid sales are down 32%. And then uh overall for this year their EV sales are down 61%.

[00:13:46]So the thing that I want to point out is we have a stronger EV market right now because gas prices are up. That's what happens. Gas price goes up more people are willing to take a chance on an EV because it's not going to cost them as much money to run as the gas vehicle. It doesn't matter what side you're on. If you're anti-EV, if you like EVs, it doesn't matter. The logic is there.

[00:14:07]People who don't care about the anti-EV or the EV mo uh movement. If they're just looking at dollars and cents, gas prices go up. EVs look more attractive because they're just cheaper to run than a gas vehicle. Even if that's not true, logically, it makes sense from someone who's not really digging into it. That let's let's let's just throw that out there that that's what's going to happen. So all along this time when gas prices are going up and the EV market is seeing more demand, we're seeing that Ford's EV sales are still going down.

[00:14:35]Now, this could be a factor of them just pulling production from a lot of the EVs. They're selling less to their dealers. Their dealers don't want them.

[00:14:42]By the way, another aspect of of an EV is that you don't have to work on them a lot. You don't have to uh get them you don't have to get oil changes. You don't have to do a lot of maintenance on them.

[00:14:52]So, of course, these Ford dealerships don't want them because, okay, they make a lot of money in service and repair, and they're not going to be doing a lot of that even with, well, I'm saying that on a Ford product, but if it's a Ford product, maybe they have to fix them all the time. Who knows? I haven't dug into this, but all along the time when EVs are more attractive, Ford's EV sales are still going down and down and down and down. And uh really it shows you the direction of what a lot of these manufacturers, at least the American manufacturers want to do is they're wanting not to go to that market.

[00:15:24]They're not making a lot of money in it.

[00:15:26]So even at the height right now around this time period of EV attraction, you're still seeing Ford dealers, you're still seeing a a manufacturer like Ford pulling away from this. So, even if there was heightened demand, Ford's not wanting to service it, or at least customers that are going to EVs, they're not going to Ford for it. And this uh could be a problem for Ford's future if if the future does mean more EVs. Um, as of right now, not looking great for the EV space. But right now, we are getting an uptick. I'm seeing even on uh at used car dealer auctions, used EV prices are starting to see a little bit of a spike.

[00:16:03]I checked the value of I've got a Tesla.

[00:16:05]I own one. Uh, I have a Model S. I even check the value of that every once in a while. And as of late, there's a loud truck going by. As of late, um, that price has gone up. Uh so there is there is a added uh increased interest in EVs right now just because of the price of