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Comment by throwawaygh | Hacker News Reader

Then replace a "no sale" provision with a "no sale over $X" provision. Or require resale to the dealership and exert control over the dealerships. Or...

There are hundreds of ways to deal with scalping that don't include locking people into ownership for a year.

Far as I can tell, what's really going on is that the dealerships threw a fit about not being able to mark prices up and Ford responded by ensuring the dealerships that at least no one else will get what the dealerships felt should have been their extra commission.

TBH, after watching this fiasco and having a single (short!) conversation with the rando middleman at the nearest dealership who I'm forced to interact with for god knows what reason... I'm probably cancelling my Lightning reservation and waiting a few more years for a Tesla or Rivian truck. The whole dealership thing is an albatross around the neck of Detriot companies. It will kill them.

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What you’re suggesting is super complicated, instead they can just decide not to sue the everyman who lost their job and sold the truck, and definitely go after the scalpers that are wealthy and just trying to flip the vehicle.

...then why not just make "no scalping" the rule and do exactly what you're proposing anyways? How is that any more complicated?

Because that caps the value of the truck long term.

retain the one year term.

this isn't rocket science.

ugh. Look. No-resale within a year is not that difficult to notice and enforce. You can look at DMV records. It is easy to correlate with who bought the truck. If you've ever sold a used vehicle, you know there is all kinds of scamming going on with what people want you to write as the sale price (what they pay taxes on) vs. what it actually sells for. How in the world would you discover what someone actually paid in a private sale transaction? Sue and do discovery after? That is incredibly expensive.

> No-resale within a year is not that difficult to notice and enforce.

Ford would have to be A) willing to actually sue someone, and B) willing to deal with the fallout when the only person who doesn't bend to their will turns out to be a widow with six kids from fucking Texas, whose legal bills are covered by a Go Fund Me and GM very publicly gives her a Silverado EV just to rub it in.

Ford will absolutely win in court, but not every battle is fought in the court room.

> no sale over $X

There is no realistic way of enforcing this.

I already gave one example of a way to enforce it in my original post: require any resale to be mediated by Ford/dealerships. That is exactly one pivot table harder to enforce than the no resale provision itself, right?

You could do a bunch of other stuff, too. E.g., require Ford to be notified of all sales. Again, this involves the impossible difficulty of one extra pivot table.

Buyers enforce it by reporting it to Ford

Why would they do that?

Because buyers hate scalpers.

Trying to placate buyers is exactly why Ford is doing this.

And Ford needs to file lawsuits and deal with all of that nonsense. They did the same thing with the GT, and the lawsuits outlasted the no-resale provisions.

The legal system is way too slow for something like this, Ford can't prove much in damages that result from this, and the cost of suing will wipe away more than anything they could claw back anyway.

This is a pointless endeavor.

Ford isn't aiming for perfect - they're doing something easy and more or less cost-free to dissuade scalpers from immediately flipping cars.

Will it prevent all scalping? No. Will it prevent some scalping? Probably, yes.

You want a tesla and that is great for you. It sounds though that this has biased you against more traditional "dealer" alternatives.

Removing features like the ability to resell does not allow dealers to jack up prices. If your reaction is anything typical, it will reduce demand and soften the dealer's position.

I see this very much as a pro-consumer move to limit speculators for reducing availability as they have repeatedly done with other high demand items.

No one, including the manufacturer (who you likely get your loan from) wants to see you default and there will almost certainly be options to sell back to the dealer to avoid that.

I specifically don't want a tesla. Nothing has biased me against traditional dealers other than dealing with them all my life.

> Or require resale to the dealership

I'm sure the dealership would happily waive the no-sale provision if you wanted to sell your truck back them. There's literally no reason not to.

That would be too hard to track and enforce.

What legitimate reason does a person have to sell their car before the first year ends? Seems highly wasteful to me, but maybe there is something I don’t know?

Edit: friends, the downvote button is not a “I disagree with you” button. This isn’t Reddit.

One could imagine a scenario where e.g. you buy this, fall on hard time, and have to sell it to make it through.

Seems like a small minority of possible cases, unless you really didn't have the means to buy it in the first place.

They should find a way to remediate such problems then, including being able to sell it back to the dealer.

The no-sale agreement is between the customer and the dealer. The dealer would happily waive it if you wanted to sell the truck back to them.

You decide you don't like the car.

The car is a buggy piece of shit.

The care works well enough but is constantly being recalled and you need a 365 work truck. (I just went into a Ford dealership to test drive a Mach-E and was told I can't because there's a seat belt recall.)

You lose your job.

Your parents get sick and you move in with them to help out, but they live in the middle of nowhere and you need >200/300 mi range.

I could keep going all day.

Lemon law protects against a number of these things

Warranties and Lemon Laws cover the first few cases

For the others, indeed buyers should see this more as a lease type contract for the first year, where you can't just get rid of it without paying a fine

It protects against the "buggy piece of shit" but only in very specific cases, which depend entirely upon which state you live in. Most notably, it only applies to new cars. Some states require you to be out of a car for a total of 90 days in one calendar year, and/or have the same problem occur several times.

In several states, recalls don't count towards lemon law because it's a preventative measure, or only applies if the nature of the recall renders the car inoperable. Meaning, you can wait four years for a replacement of a potentially deadly airbag.

You can absolutely have a buggy piece of shit that can't be lemon law'ed.

Getting a car lemon law'ed is a nightmare. It's rare that you have a cut-and-dry case. Just ask people with those Ford Powershift transmissions in their Fiestas.

A warranty will ensure that someone doesn't have to pay to fix the buggy piece of shit, assuming the buggy shit isn't a wear item that the dealership can claim that the owner broke. But there's still the hassle of scheduling the fix, taking the car to the dealership, hoping they have transportation for you, etc.

.. because a purchase means that the purchaser now owns the item, not the manufacturer. How has that changed? Who benefits?

We bought our previous car from a guy who did just that. He loved cars, so he bought them, drove them for 6-9 months and sold them. Yes he took a huge loss, but it was his hobby.

A couple we know bought one of the new Morris Mini's a few years back, and one month later they discovered they were having a kid. The Mini isn't the most practical vehicle for a new family, so they sold it and bought something else before the kid was born.

We just got our car totalled and we were not prepared to get a new car just yet. We might be getting a larger garage this year which would allow us to park ID.4/Ioniq 5 sized vehicles in it, so timing wasn't awesome. So we bought an second-hand vehicle which we plan to sell within a year.

Things happen.

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