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Ford's UK boss has again expressed concern that residual value setters have failed to recognise the firm's actions to slash its short-cycle business with a view to improving RVs.
Speaking in 2013, the company's managing director, Mark Ovenden, said he felt the company's efforts to cut business that hampered residual values had been ignored, while other manufacturers continued unhindered: "So an appeal would be for a little bit more consistency from the ratings agencies to recognise the steps that Ford is taking to reduce our short-cycle business, and to level up the playing field a little bit more to recognise the amount of short-cycle business that certain other brands are doing."
More recently, he told BusinessCar: "I still think that's the case. It's not for me to talk about other people's, but I don't think there's enough recognition of what we've done in rebalancing away from short-cycle business, and it's just a never-ending thing.
"In the end, you can't buck the market. We will continually try and reduce the amount of short-cycle business we do, and other people continue to do what they do on either rental, of self regs or demos, or all that. Eventually the market will wake up to it, it just takes time."
Ovenden continued: "The challenge is, unless the guide says it there is a little bit of self-fulfilling prophecy because the guides are so influential in prices - that if they say something is something, then something becomes something. It's almost like the fundamentals and the physicals don't quite get into it.
"But all we can do [is] work very closely with the guides, and we don't have any problem with them.
"All we need to just keep doing is talk, and over time if there are fewer short-cycle Fords out there you can't buck the laws of economics for ages."
He said the firm would continue with its current strategy and hoped its efforts would eventually be recognised: "In the end we can only keep walking the talk on our own strategy and eventually the market will catch up, but it's a little bit frustrating and we'd like to do a little bit better than we do.
"If you look at some of our volume competitors then we are doing better, it's just we have particular competitors in mind who we think we should be closing the gap on presently.
"[The RV setters] have got a job to do and no one's ever going to thank them if they over-call an RV, so I understand their job. I just think that maybe it's down to us - they need to get a better understanding of the fundamentals that we believe should be pushing our RVs. But in the end the market decides: the price is the price is the price."
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