Ford initially committed to building the second-generation GT for two years, with 250 units promised for each year. The Blue Oval said later it would
add another two years onto the run of the race-bred supercar, bringing the total to 1,000. Well, things haven’t gone exactly as planned.
Motor Authority discovered through a Ford GT message board that Ford didn’t fulfill the full production run plans of the 2017 GT. We reached out to Ford, and a spokesman confirmed that Ford and its high-tech Canadian partner that builds the car, Multimatic, built just 138 2017 GTs instead of the 250 that had been promised.
Why the delay?
"This is a hand-built supercar, which we are committed to deliver flawlessly. We built into our process an extended ramp-up due to several factors such as global homologation testing and supplier constraints," a Ford spokesman said in a statement.
A follow-up phone call revealed that Multimatic hadn't built cars on this scale before and it took the company some time to meet its goal of building one car per work day. The first Ford GT came out of the shop in December 2016, but Multimatic didn't start building one car per day until the middle of 2017. That, teamed with some supplier issues and some minor delays in
painting the special Victory cars to commemorate the GT's class win at the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans, resulted in the production shortfall for the 2017 model year. The spokesman also noted that things are on schedule for the full run of 250 to be built for the 2018 model year.
At the current pace, however, that would leave total production at 888 units, 112 units shy of the initial promised total. So, will that leave the total four-year production run shy of the promised 1,000? We asked Ford.
“We are building one Ford GT a day and are committed to building the vehicle for at least four years,” a Ford spokesman said in a statement.
We pressed further: “We’re sticking to our initial commitment of 1,000 vehicles,” he said.
That would necessarily mean building the Ford GT for more than four years because Multimatic can only build 250 per year. Another half year or so would be needed to make up for the missing 112 cars from the short 2017 run.
No matter what, it appears, Ford enthusiasts will see the full run 1,000 GTs. It will just take longer than initially expected.
