Shelby’s $18,400 Carbon Fiber GT500KR Hood Causes Drama

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We caught a really interesting article on Autoblog the other day about one owner that had to deal with a bunch of red tape to replace the hood on his 2008 Shelby GT500KR.  The GT500KR was a special edition Mustang GT500 with a number of improvements, and an $80,000 price tag.

Among those improvements was a carbon fiber hood, which one owner soon found out was worth a bit of cash.  That owner unfortunately hit a rodent, damaging some of the front end of the vehicle…including the hood.  When inquiring about replacing the damaged items, he found out that a new hood would run $18,400.  Keep in mind that Shelby made KR-specific parts in order to maintain the image of the car, this of course included the hood.  Part of maintaining that image and exclusivity is retained in the cost, but isn’t $18,400 a little overkill?  On top of that, Shelby required that any damaged KR parts that were to get replaced would have to be returned to their Las Vegas facility before they send out the new part.

Shelby GT500KR

If it sounds a little ridiculous to you, you’re not the only one.  Autoblog put on the investigator hat and gave Shelby’s VP of Marketing, Jim Owens, a call to get the full understanding.  What Owens said was that the hood was the only full carbon-fiber production hood available in the U.S., but it had also gone through certification process like any other OEM product, including crash testing.  When it comes to the limited numbers that the car was produced (1,571), along with the carbon-fiber production/testing, it helped to somewhat legitimize the high expense for a replacement.

“I will tell you – there was no less design, engineering and testing – that went into this component… than goes into any other component in the exotic car world. It was the single biggest piece of this program.”

Even with all of this, there was quite a bit of outrage within the community, and Shelby reconsidered the pricing strategy on the hood, dropping it down to $9,700.  Here’s a quote about that from Owen:

“So, we got the feedback off of the websites – the Team Shelby site specifically. Based off of that fact, we are lowering the price of the hood – substantially. We’re lowering it to $9,700. Additionally, we are now also going to go through all of the remaining carbon fiber components and take a look at that pricing, including skullcaps and splitters.”

You can read the full back story over at Autoblog.  What’s your opinion?  Is Shelby’s hood price ok to keep its exclusivity?  They don’t necessarily want V6 Mustang’s being mistook for a KR, people didn’t pay the $80,000 pricetag for nothing.

[Source: Autoblog]

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