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GFYS has trickled down to many non-EV dealers as well, in my experience. I visited a Subaru dealer in a high-population area last year and was told that they h

• cjrp 4y ago
  I wouldn't say that's GFYS, depending on how the dealership staff handled it. Supply issues are everywhere, but I agree that not letting people even sit in a car is crappy customer service.
  • steveBK123 4y ago
    Crappy customer service at the sales point - where they don't even have any money from you yet is a really bad sign. It's only going to go downhill from there generally. Especially knowing their nearest service center was 100s of miles away, but "coming soon" near me.
    • rnk 4y ago
      It doesn't sound great, could it be simple miscommunication? It does sound like they made an enemy that day.
• dboreham 4y ago
  Random contrary data point: I was around when two Subarus were purchased from the Bozeman dealer last year. Yes they had no cars on the lot (plenty of overpriced used vehicles) but if you were willing to wait a couple of months and take the vehicles in their incoming pipeline all was good.
  • kortilla 4y ago
    That’s not contrary. That’s taking what they had available, which is what GP had to settle for at the Toyota place.
• steveBK123 4y ago
  It's one thing to not have cars on the lot, its another to have one there and try to take deposits from people while not let them touch/sit in the car 2 feet away!
• magikaram 4y ago
  I'd say that is dealer specific, I purchased a new Impreza in September of 2021, my specific trim and options weren't on the lot, and was easily given a factory order. Got a '22 Impreza Sport Hatchback with no hassle, would easily recommend this dealer again. Seems to be the case on the Impreza forum too, as most owners are buying factory orders from the dealers, with a few saying that the dealer only sells Imprezas thru custom orders. As for other models, that may be different. My family had no issue with getting a Forester.
• matthew28845 4y ago
  Assuming the plug-in Toyota is a RAV4 Prime? Those were impossible to find over COVID and dealers were asking close to six figures for them.
  • saagarjha 4y ago
    There's still a hefty markup on them, in some places $15k or even more.
  • temp_praneshp 4y ago
    Don't you have to get a crazy amount of miles on that car to make it worth paying close to six figures? How do most people not just walk away from that kind of deal?
    • rootusrootus 4y ago
      If you are buying at MSRP, the RAV4 Prime almost never makes sense without the federal tax credit (that it no longer qualifies for). If you buy one, you are doing it for the increased performance or your own desire to have a PHEV. If you are simply in it for the most economical RAV4, get the regular hybrid trim.
• steveBK123 4y ago
  Remember the key thing here. Lucid/Rivian/Tesla are direct sales model. With a traditional dealer you are dealing essentially with middlemen who inventory vehicles or get order allocations from the manufacturer. Traditional dealers mostly make money on financing/parts/services/etc. If the dealer has no inventory/allocations then they don't really care about you. So they don't want you wasting their time if you are going to go order the car somewhere else. And realistically, you shouldn't care about them.. you have 1000 other places to go buy a Ford. In the direct sales model, every person in that store works for the manufacturer as well. They are poisoning customers on the brand in its totality rather than just Joe Shmo Ford dealer in town. The stores are all portals to the same national inventory / order queue. To go from "GFYS" in July to "Please buy our cars" in November/December is inept.
  • hef19898 4y ago
    It is always fascinating how different car sales are in the US when compared to Europe. In Europe, for new cars at least, dealer sell production slots. You configure your car, the dealer gets a delivery date from the OEM, you get yoyr car at that date or pick it up at the factory. Pre configured cars are either exposition cars, cars registered for a day to move OEM inventory, or dealer inventory, not sold like above. Or they are 6-12 months old and coming from various short term leasing and rental services. This approach makes planning for OEMs a lot easier as well. Oh, and you always pay whatever the ticlet price is,inus negotiated disclunts. Nothing like list price plus, just because the dealer feels like it.
    • brianwawok 4y ago
      You don't have strong networks of dealers paying money to the government to have a monopoly err protect the consumers?
    • nradov 4y ago
      Some US franchised dealers will order a car for you, but you'll usually pay full MSRP with little room to negotiate. Porsche, for example, does a large fraction of their sales that way. But custom ordering for many cheaper mainstream brands has become kind of pointless. The manufacturers no longer allow picking and choosing individual options and instead roll everything into a couple of large option packages. So, if you want the good sound system then you have to pay for the sunroof as well even if you don't want it. Many US consumers expect to buy a vehicle off the lot and drive it away that day. Part of that is cultural. But many customers come in to buy because their old car was just wrecked or broken down, so they can't afford to wait months for a replacement.
• ak217 4y ago
  Had a great experience with Ford ordering a Mustang Mach-E (including transparent pricing at MSRP as well as canceling a reservation for another one - they refunded the deposit with no questions asked). Ford is really working hard to get their dealerships and their whole org to perform - Jim Farley and his top lieutenants (at least on the EV side) seem to be the best leaders in the industry. I was impressed. Compare this to Hyundai/Kia, where every dealership was staffed by the stereotypical sleazy salesmen trying to charge me $10K over MSRP. They make great cars but lost control over their dealerships.
  • __derek__ 4y ago
    Interesting. I had the opposite experience after placing an early pre-order for the F-150 Lightning. The expected delivery date kept slipping back, the price kept increasing, and the salesman I was forced to interact with had no idea what was going on. They did refund quickly after I cancelled, though.
  • Animats 4y ago
    > dealership was staffed by the stereotypical sleazy salesmen trying to charge me $10K over MSRP. That describes Towne Ford in Redwood City, CA, including the $10K markup.
  • raminf 4y ago
    Went to a Kia dealer in San Jose to look at the 2023 EV6 in early February. It was getting great reviews in magazines like Car and Driver. Sales guy said they had only two of that configuration on the lot. Wouldn't let us sit in them or take them out for a test drive. Absolutely nuts. Walked away and went down the street. Every other dealer was more than happy to go on test drives, even when they had low inventory.
    • filoleg 4y ago
      This feels like a common KIA dealership thing, which is a shame, because they are finally making somewhat interesting cars now. Around the time Kia Stinger GT came out and the hypetrain was pumping at the max (2017-2018), I heard plenty of stories of people being refused Stinger test drives at the dealerships. Most of them had a common theme of the potential buter not "looking right". I.e., too young or not looking like what the dealership employees imagine someone who could afford Kia Stinger would look. Often it was outright refusal, other times it was some bs made up reason, even though it was obvious the cars were used for test drives and were available. Conveniently enough for the dealership, just not for those specific customers. This is extremely ironic, because the more "premium" the car brand is, the better they treat you at the dealership, even if you clearly cannot afford it at the moment. Here is a personal anecdote. I went to a BMW dealership once (the most "premium" brand dealership I've ever went to by that point in time), because I was thinking of upgrading my decade+ old Camry. I didn't have money at the time to buy, but that was fine, because I had honestly no idea what car I wanted in any terms other than i wanted it to be "good" and "no larger than a Camry, preferably closer to being Honda Civic-sized". So I scheduled a bunch of test drives at different dealerships to try out a bunch of different cars and see it for myself. Plus, even if I had the money to buy at that time, I knew that a major redesign was coming for BMWs I was looking for in the next few years, and I was going to wait until then regardless. I didn't want to waste anyone's time, so I honestly told all of that to the salesman working with me at the dealership. The experience I got was great, even with all of that info in mind. No aggresive sales tactics, no "we might have a financing option that could work for you" insistence after being told "no" once, suggesting other fun cars to try ("since you aren't planning to buy now anyway, wanna try this cool i8? I know a street about a mile away that is a long stretch with no cameras or cops, and it is usually empty, so we can test out the car there for real."), and in general just providing great service all around (any inventory questions and delivery times were discussed in the most plain and no bs terms). I don't even like BMW cars, but this experience made me strongly consider one in the future and understand why some people swear by brands like Mercedes/Audi/BMW/Porsche/etc., despite some of their cars being pretty questionable and (arguably) not the best bang for the buck. Disclaimer: I've never owned and still don't own a car from any of the brands mentioned, and neither do I have any relationship with those companies outside of test driving a few of their cars.
• jandrese 4y ago
  Car manufacturers discovered that they can get higher profit margins per vehicle with supply constrained, and now they are addicted to it. GM is actually cutting production to avoid having to give up the "low supply" margins. This is the kind of thing that works until some competitor decides to ramp production and drop prices and eat your lunch. On a side note Tesla is just opened up their Texas gigafactory and recently dropped prices across the board.
  • rchaud 4y ago
    This is a prisoner's dilemma situation, and it doesn't look like it's in anyone's interest to defect. By keeping supply constrained, everybody's profit margins are rising.
    • jandrese 4y ago
      Hyundai is poised to suppress Stellantis in the US in new car sales because they're one of the few manufacturers actually selling a product the average American can afford. This is despite some serious quality issue headwinds. Source: https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/volume-is-for-vanity-profit-is-for-sanity/ https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/volume-is-for-van...
• gamblor956 4y ago
  I visited a Subaru dealer in a high-population area last year and was told that they had one specific model coming in one specific undesirable color coming in about 4 months and asking if I wanted to reserve because it wouldn't last long. How is this GFYS? The car you wanted was not on the lot, so you had to factory-order it. That meant a wait. And due to the pandemic-related parts issues, that meant a much longer wait than normal. Would you have preferred they lie to you, tell you that the car you wanted was just about to arrive, and then string you along for months until it actually did arrive? (I also ordered a Subaru last year in a high-population area. I had to reserve it in advance, and waited 4 months for it. It's a good thing I did, since that model and trim has been selling immediately as soon as it arrives on the lot: within 250 miles of me, the only available vehicles have been reservations on dealer-orders that were placed by buyers who also placed factory orders.)
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    > you had to factory-order it. Nitpick. You don't factory order a Subaru (or Toyota, or any other Japanese automaker for that matter). You can put your desired specs on a waitlist, however, for when one that matches comes out of the pipe. This is distinct from a domestic manufacturer like GM, where you absolutely can place an order for a car exactly matching your desires, and it will get allocated and produced with your name already on it, configured exactly as you want.
    • gamblor956 4y ago
      If you want to nitpick about it, some Subarus are made in the U.S., in Indiana, and you can factory orders those models. https://www.subaru-sia.com/about https://www.subaru-sia.com/about This is distinct from placing a reservation on an already-specced vehicle in the pipeline, which you can still modify with packages (but for which the engine, paint, and internal trim colors are locked). I placed a reservation on a dealer-ordered vehicle which just happened to already be specced the way I would have factory-ordered it.
      • rootusrootus 4y ago