Dealer Transfer, rather than Factory Order

[virtual]

I'm a noobie here, and will shortly be taking possession of what will be my 4th Exploder. They say the best time to buy is when you don't need too, and since my old Explorer has been running great I didn't feel the urge to upgrade it. I really only started looking again, because I have always bought Green Explorers and for some reason Ford, in their infinite wisdom have decided to discontinue Green as a 2014 color. So I decided I'd see if there were any Green ones left from 2013, but was disappointed by my available choices (as mainly the ones left were very low end, or very high end, and I want something in the middle), and then ended up discussing what it would take to get me into a 2014 Explorer with exactly the options I wanted.

Once I started considering a 2014, with "my" options, I naturally assumed we were talking about waiting for a factory order, and for one of the dealers I talked too, that's what they were talking about. For the other dealer, they went looking through their computer and found one exactly to my spec up in another dealers lot up New York (I'm in Northern Virginia) and said they would transfer it to my location for free.

It turns out that the one we haggled price over ended up being sold before they could get it, but they then found me another one matching my spec up in PA and got it instead. So, not that I'm any kind of expert on this, but it does seem to me that unless there is something really unique about the particular configuration you want (and of course, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that ) you might want to see if your dealer is able to "find" one out there for you and do a dealer transfer for it, rather than have to wait for one from the factory.

 

[gwjoeymed]

Yep. Good advice. I really wanted a Sport model in red or black with the sienna interior. He found one or two, but one did not have a trailer hitch and the other had the DVD headsets which were a $2000 option. Years ago I would have said yes to the DVD headsets, but with iPads, iPods, books, kindles, I don't feel it is a useful option for me anymore.

Also, the sport sub-models aren't as easy to come by, much more infrequent than XLT or Limited.

So, I had to order. And it helped, like you, I was in no rush to get the car

My thoughts...

 

[Sgt1411]

I really only started looking again, because I have always bought Green Explorers and for some reason Ford, in their infinite wisdom have decided to discontinue Green as a 2014 color. So I decided I'd see if there were any Green ones left from 2013, but was disappointed by my available choices (as mainly the ones left were very low end, or very high end, and I want something in the middle), and then ended up discussing what it would take to get me into a 2014 Explorer with exactly the options I wanted.



They don't just drop colours for the sake of it. The colours are influenced by marketing trends, yes, but if the "take rate" of green paint is a very small percentage of units then the colour is dropped.

Why hold large quantity's of green paint if no one is buying it.

There is actually a lot of factors that influence colour changes, its not just for the sake of change.

 

[virtual]

They don't just drop colours for the sake of it. The colours are influenced by marketing trends, yes, but if the "take rate" of green paint is a very small percentage of units then the colour is dropped.

Why hold large quantity's of green paint if no one is buying it.

There is actually a lot of factors that influence colour changes, its not just for the sake of change.

I totally understand the supply/demand aspects of why Ford might discontinue a color. I certainly don't take it personally, but that doesn't change my own color preference in any way, or my disappointment that Green is no longer an option. I was kinda hoping that Dark Side might be the "new Green", but that definitely is not the case based on viewing it.

In the end I kinda felt like we had to settle for Gray as compromise color, and that's a bit of a shame to have to decide to settle, when you're dropping a bunch of money on a new car. It certainly wasn't the dealers fault, and as we worked through the other details of options and pricing, the question did come up about whether or not I would have been willing to pay more for a Green one if it was an option (the implication being that having more color options would increase the production cost, and hence consumer cost) and my answer was that: yes I would.. to a point..

Not sure what that $$ point is, but though there are still some Green ones out there, but in the end we decided not to settle for fewer options than we wanted, and decided not to pay several thousand more for one with extra stuff we didn't really want on it, and for a car that was already a model year older. Unlike when I bought last time (and I'm sure this is motivated by the current sales environment) they didn't seem to be discounting prior year models much, if at all.

 

[Sgt1411]

I would be interested to know if your dealer did a nation wide search for green XLT

Gotta be some 2013 XLT green stock out there somewhere

 

[virtual]

I would be interested to know if your dealer did a nation wide search for green XLT

Gotta be some 2013 XLT green stock out there somewhere

I thought I replied to this, but somehow it didn't post So here's a 2nd try..

FWIW, I don't think the dealer searched the whole of the US, but I'm pretty sure that they did search the US North East. They provided us a list of Green explorers that were as close as they could find to what we were looking for, and I know that at least one of them was from upstate NY, and one was from Ohio. The dealer told us that they would have to "buy" the car from the other dealer in order to transfer it to their location and (reasonably) asked us to be pretty confident that we wanted the car before they did that. In the end, we still felt kinda "eh.." about the closest match, so we didn't ask them to bring it in.

I'm sure many people on here have interesting car buying stories, but I'm pretty confident ours was a pretty inefficient approach. Our decision was about price and options, so I suspect we were fairly difficult customers. Originally I used the web to try and find all of the Green Explorers within a 100 miles of D.C. and talked to the dealers who had them. Later, after finding the more local dealer we ended up buying from, and after they had offered to transfer in a 2014 model with exactly the options we wanted, rather than order it from the factory, we thought to ask them if there were any Green ones out there matching our want list. Some of the same "relatively local" ones I had found myself were on the list they gave us, and strangely enough our local dealer was willing to acquire and sell them to us for less than the dealer who actually had them in their inventory. The intricacies of how dealers, and dealer pricing works is beyond me :scratch: