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Because prices have climbed so high for the 2005/2006 Ford GT, people tend to forget that not only was the car priced initially somewhere in between a Porsche 911 Turbo and Lamborghini Gallardo, but it was so undesirable and such a sales flop that Ford was forced to cease production.
Despite Ford producing over 4,000 GTs from 2004 to 2006, it only managed to sell a smidge over 3,200 by the end of 2006. Even with sales stretching into 2007, Ford found itself with an inventory overstock of 15 per cent of its total production run — and it would have been 25 per cent had it committed to its planned production run of 4,500 units.
Go ahead and ask somebody who was a Ford dealer at the time. They’ll tell you GTs simply rotted in showrooms, if they weren’t immediately wrapped around poles by unsuspecting customers. Some months were so bad that total sales figures were in the single digits.
While secondhand prices never truly tanked, they did dip as low as the $100,000 mark by the late 2000s.
So is it any wonder that Ford took a drastically different approach with the follow-up GT? After all, why build a blue-collar supercar if blue-collar buyers don’t want one? If you’re going to lose money on a car anyway, why not make something ridiculously exclusive in obscenely small production runs that only buyers with the deepest pockets can afford?
This tactic seems to have worked for the LeMans-winning, 660-horsepower, twin-turbo V6, hyper-aero, reimagined GT hypercar sold from 2016 to 2023. At the end of the run in 2023, Ford sent out a press release proudly claiming they sold 31 units that year. Which doesn’t seem like something to brag about, except that the run was originally planned to be limited to 1,000 cars, and had already been extended by an additional 350 units, and then again by another 30 to meet demand. Sure, Ford sold fewer cars this time around, but it didn’t have any leftovers, either.
Which means this 2019 Carbon Series Ford GT offered for sale right now by Marianetti Motors Inc. in Vaughan, Ont., and listed on AutoTrader is even rarer than you might realize.
For starters, it’s one of only 50 Carbon Series units produced during the car’s entire production run.
While there weren’t many options for the Carbon Series (you couldn’t, for example, delete the air conditioning and radio like you could in the Competition Series), this particular car is finished in the Liquid Grey paint colour with the dual exposed stripes that show off the carbon fibre body work, and also features the “Carbon Series Exterior Orange Accent Colour Package” (read, “orange stripe”). No, it’s not the only one like it on the planet, but you’ll be hard pressed to find another.
The Carbon Series is a slight misnomer, however. True, this car sheds around 40 pounds from the standard GT, but it does so by utilizing Titanium lug nuts and exhaust tips, as well as lighter glass for the car's hatch to achieve its weight savings.
The second-generation GT’s bodywork and wheels were already made out of carbon fibre, but at least those exposed stripes look awesome.
How awesome? Well, the asking price for this car is over $1,000,000. So, apparently that awesome.
It’s such a high price tag that even the obscenely overinflated first-generation models present themselves as an absolute bargain compared to this one.
But if you can afford to shell out that kind of cash for one of the world’s most exclusive hypercars, just do the rest of us a favour and drive the thing. That 295 km on the odometer is driving the rest of us normal people crazy.
