Fleets Flirting With Ford's Fusion
Ford’s fleet business has traditionally been in trucks and full-sized vans, a fact that explains why you’ve never seen an E-Series van in anything other than fleet white. But with residuals on the Ford Fusion staying higher than, well, the Sebring and Malibu, Ford’s recently-refreshed midsized sedan is becoming an attractive fleet option as analysts project a pickup in corporate fleet buying this year. Ford’s Jim Farley tells Automotive News [sub]:
We’re seeing a whole new group of clients come to us saying we want to buy Fusions. We’ve never had that before, at least in the recent past, and that has really grown our commercial fleet business.
Never had this before? Really? What about Crown Vic/Towncar? What about the third- and fourth-gen Taurus? What about the V6 Mustang Convertible that every rental storefront has at least one of? Besides, what happened to reducing profit-sucking fleet dependence? Oh well, something had to replace the Pontiac G6. And if anything kills a model’s resale, it’s heavy fleet sales… if that’s what is drawing the corporate interest, it won’t last long.
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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These fleet sales are not the ones that flood the market with one year old low mile rentals. Most fleets that I am aware of keep cars for at least 3 years and often pushing 100K miles. This has no affect on the residual value like rental cars do. My company buys cars that we use 5 years or 100K+ on the odometer. They for the most part do not even go back into the used car market, our franchisees buy them for book value.
I suspect the difference is that these fleet sales are happening at a whole lot closer to normal retail price, rather than the super deep discounts it took to sell Tauri and G6s to the rental car agencies. Lately I have been getting almost nothing but compact and mid-size Japanese cars from Hertz, I can't imagine Toyota and Nissan are giving them anything like the discounts they used to get from GM and Ford. But the good residuals and reliability probably make the TCO lower.
I guess that explains where a lot of those 7K+ Taurus' went last month.
"Ford’s fleet business has traditionally been in trucks and full-sized vans ... " Ford has been selling large numbers of cars to corporate and government fleets forever.