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Comment by redox99 | Hacker News Reader

> The cheapest F150 Lightning (available today not in 2025) is $50k

Can you actually buy it at that price?

I see several listed in my area for around $53k. So approximately yes.

What you see listed and what the dealer will actually give it to you for are not necessarily the same thing, infamously so in the case of in-demand models like this.

I think the tide has turned on the Lightening. I know that dealers near me are trying to sell the ones they have.

Car dealers say they can’t sell EVs, tell Biden to slow their rollout

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38460281

I wonder if the price-gouge-EV-customers and complain-about-EV-subsidies groups overlap... Hmm.

I think probably it's a disjoint group, or at least a disjoint set of circumstances. What the dealers are complaining about are the rules phasing in about what % of your sales need to be EVs. There are some successes, like the F-150, but there are also a ton of terrible legacy manufacturer EVs that nobody wants to buy that are kinda just sitting around. If Ford and the other carmakers could make vehicles as popular as the F-150 in quantity, I don't think the dealers would care.

I heard similar grumbles from Hyundai dealers around San Jose, CA, re: the Ioniq 5, and that model got a lot of accolades and is frequently recommended as an alternative to the Tesla Model Y for its category. I'm not sure what's going on is strictly a legacy model desirability issue.

It might be a "legacy dealers can't sell even good EVs because they don't know enough about them" issue though. Really hard to say, but that definitely would match my personal experience talking to a number of them.

> If Ford and the other carmakers could make vehicles as popular as the F-150 in quantity, I don't think the dealers would care.

They can make smaller EVs that are more popular than the larger and more luxurious vehicles, but they can't sell them as profitably as the larger vehicles.

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