Earlier this week we reported about the second price hike for the Ford EcoSport in a span of less than a year and how Ford’s pricing strategy and long waiting periods for the EcoSport haven’t gone down well with customers. Ford has also not provided any sort of price protection to customers who booked their vehicles earlier and it means that buyers would have to pay the price that is existing at the time of delivery. Ford sells ten variants of the EcoSport and right now bookings are closed for eight of these variants.
Until now, Ford India has managed to bag more than 60,000 bookings for the vehicle and even seven months after its launch, only 33,000-odd EcoSports have been delivered. The main reason for this is high demand and low supply. All manufacturers outsource many components from outside vendors and these suppliers are failing to cope up with the demand raised by Ford. This has resulted into a long waiting period of eight months. Also, Ford exports 1 out of every 5 EcoSports produced and this could be another reason for the increased waiting periods.
Now, Ford dealers are calling up customers who have booked the EcoSport and trying to convince them to transfer their bookings to the Figo, Classic or Fiesta. It is obvious that customers are not too happy with this situation and many of them would prefer to completely cancel their bookings and shift to vehicles from other makers such as Honda Amaze, Honda City or even the Mahindra XUV5OO W4. When launched in June 2013, the EcoSport was priced between Rs. 5.59-8.99 lakhs (ex-showroom, Delhi) however the current price range is from Rs. 6.19-9.74 lakhs (ex-showroom, Delhi).
