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| © Provided by CBS Interactive Inc. Brown Lee Ford in Tennessee wants to sell you a 700 horsepower Mustang with a warranty for $40,000. Ford |
That old adage that horsepower sells cars is totally true. Look at cars like the Hellcat or the ZR1 Corvette or the upcoming Shelby GT500.
The thing is that those cars are kind of expensive and not every geek
off the street can afford them, so there's a whole network of
aftermarket tuners and dealers that can fulfill your need for speed for
way less than the $90,000 that a Hellcat Red Eye will set you back.
Case in point, we have Brown Lee Performance, a Ford dealer from the fine state of Tennessee which announced on Thursday that it is willing to build and sell you a 700-horsepower Ford Mustang for around $40,000. Now, here's the thing, as someone who has driven multiple carswith that kind of horsepower,
I can firmly say that it's probably too much power for most people on
the street -- myself included -- but that won't stop an enthusiast.
Still,
Brown Lee's offer is wild enough that it got my attention, so what
exactly does a 700-hp $40-grand car look like? Well, to start with, you
get a 2020 Ford Mustang GT in either Grabber Lime or Twister Orange (a $495 option).
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| © Provided by CBS Interactive Inc. Brown Lee's road to horsepower starts with one of these bad boys: a Roush Phase 1 supercharger. Ford |
Now, consider that Ford lists the GT fastback at $36,475 before any
options. If you want an automatic transmission, that adds $1,595 to the
price, so we assume that the Brown Lee kit starts with a manual.
Then you add a Phase 1 Roush TVS supercharger kit,
which on its own retails for $7,699. That kit includes the supercharger
itself, an intake kit, an intercooler, the software to recalibrate the
factory ECU, and all the hoses, belts and brackets necessary to bolt it
in.
Now, Brown Lee Performance says that these modified Mustangs
will retain their factory warranty and can be bought on finance and all
the usual stuff you'd expect when purchasing a new car. What I can't
wrap my head around is how the dealer is making any money on this deal?
Well, to start, the way Ford's dealer pricing
works (or at least the way it worked when I was a Ford dealership
employee so many years ago) is that the more vehicles a dealer sells and
the better its customer service feedback is, the lower its pricing will
be when buying stock from the manufacturer.
This means that a
company like Galpin Ford in Southern California -- aka the
highest-volume Ford dealer in the world -- is going to pay a lot less
for its Mustang GT than a smaller dealer. It would stand to reason that
Brown Lee is a relatively high-volume dealer.
Next, Brown Lee is a Roush
Master Dealer, which means that it does sufficient business in selling
and installing Roush performance products that it gets Roush's best
pricing. So instead of paying $7,699 for a Phase 1 supercharger kit, it's probably paying around half that.
Roadshow
spoke to Brown Lee's specialty vehicles manager Brock Patterson and
learned that the dealership plans on selling around 200 Roush-modified
Mustangs this year. That's not nothing, and when you consider that the
$39,995 asking price doesn't include brake or suspension or wheel and
tire upgrades, we'll be surprised if most of them don't roll off the lot
for a lot more than that.
