I agree that greedy Ford dealers helped cause this problem. I looked at the Ford Mach-E but was turned off by dealer markup, got a Tesla instead.
Ford should go direct. Lobby for changing the law to get rid of these parasites.
I just bought a ford less than a year ago. One of those Maverick trucks since the gas mileage is really good. It's a good suburban truck for hauling or camping that still lets you commute to the city and navigate tight spaces.
The hybrids were actually marked up the worst, often 10k rather than 5k, and couldn't have AWD which was one of my requirements.
An ICE engine is intrinsically complex to make, has many moving parts that wear out, is hot because it is inefficient at turning fuel into power. Plus, you know, the pollution.
A battery pack that holds sufficient joules is not intrinsically large and expensive any more than a 100 megabyte disk had to be the size of a washing machine and cost as much as a house, which was once the case.
Battery packs, even with current technology, cause little to no environmental damage, that is oil industry propaganda. Lithium and cobalt are fairly common, and all the cobalt we would ever need is accidentally produced as a side-effect of copper and nickel mining all over the world, that we would be doing anyway.
This is nonsense, because the battery packs are already cheap enough. The value of savings from cheap battery packs is simply not being passed on to the end consumer, because the car companies and dealerships can get away with not doing so.
It doesn't matter if Ford or Tesla builds battery packs for $90/KWh and the engine is 2x cheaper than the ICE car, if later on it is marked up appropriately to be sold as a luxury good.
NONE of the battery packs in current EVs cost more than $10000 to make, for ANY manufacturer. Which means they are pricing the econoboxes that contain the batteries at $30,000, which is ridiculous.
The dealers are often up-charging MORE for fuel efficient hybrids or EVs. It might be 2-5k more for a gas burner, but you get nailed 10k over MSRP for the hybrid or EV option.
They're effectively making you pay the difference in the cost of gasoline up front so there's no economic incentive to the consumer to get the better MPG or emission-free option.
I haven't done the math but intuitively it seems like you end up pre-paying the difference you'd save by using less to no gasoline.
I think part of it is also that dealers / manufacturers are creatively trying to capture tax incentives as well. Instead of the consumer getting a cheaper EV via tax breaks, the dealer or manufacture charges that much more and it ends up in their pocket.
It's messed up. Just about every large business in America is on the government teat in various creative ways. They're not innovating or competing anymore.
A different way to look at it: the dealers are trying to make you pay for the difference in oil changes and maintenance costs. EVs don't need regular oil changes and service checkups. For many dealers those services are their actual bread-and-butter where they make the most profit.