Mustang GT500 News: Greedy Dealership Also Sloppy
Dealers often put giant markups on high-demand models. Is it too much to ask they care a little about the listing?
With 760 horsepower and 625 lb-ft of torque, the Mustang Shelby GT500 is a lot of car — and it’s also going to cost a lot of money. The official starting MSRP, courtesy of our friends in Dearborn, is $70,300, and depending how buyers option their cars, it’ll climb significantly from there. Of course, that figure is the “suggested” retail price, which means that many dealers are going to abide by it as rigidly as new GT500 owners are going to follow posted speed limits.
Despite that I used the word “greedy” — a fairly loaded term, to be sure — in the headline, I am not some delicate flower who thinks that car dealers are in the game out of some altruistic need to help people. Nope. Car dealers, including all of the bad, shady ones, and every single one of the helpful, honest, friendly ones, sells cars so they can make money. So if, say, some hyper-flush Mustang fan wants to pay the $145,000 that Koons Sterling Ford is asking for its 2020 example of this potent Pony? More power to them.
As I said, Koons Sterling Ford wants to make money. All good. My question is, does the listing have to look so sloppy?
First off, the initial posting for the Shelby — as our friends at Jalopnik pointed out — listed the car as having a Tremec six-speed manual transmission. That, as every enthusiast following the development of the latest Shelby knows, isn’t accurate, as all GT500s will have a seven-speed DCT. When news broke that there would be no third pedal option, it was a pretty big deal, and it was as high profile as Save the Manuals examples come. So someone clearly wasn’t paying attention.
But that’s basically a copy error, and since I’m a crappy copy editor, I’m inclined to forgive the mistake, even if I can’t figure out how it would have happened.
As a writer, however, I’m less inclined to forever the way that the listing is just one spec after the other, in a big block of text with no paragraph breaks, or really, any accommodation for humans to actually read it. Plus, the initial section is in all caps, so it looks just like your drunk uncle’s latest negative review of Applebee’s. Maybe this approach to text works great for Google crawlers, but if a dealer is going to bother to post a description of a wicked machine like this? It wouldn’t hurt to put maybe, five minutes worth of effort into it. After all, with an asking price nearly double MSRP, this GT500 will likely be there for a while.
Photos: Ford
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