Paying the ($99) fee won't buy a place in line

[lhoboy]

What's this garbage?:

"Paying the fee -- the maximum permitted without violating state laws -- won't buy a place in line for the ForTwo, expected to go on sale in early 2008, says Schembri." according to a February AutoWeek article.


Full Article

[SMART]

This is a pretty old article but for the most part is true. Any $99 dollar registration will not hold you to the guaranteed purchase of the car in 2008.

[lhoboy]

Originally Posted by SMART

This is a pretty old article but for the most part is true. Any $99 dollar registration will not hold you to the guaranteed purchase of the car in 2008.

But it sounds like the reverse is also true. It implies they feel they have no obligation to offer me a car.

[PassionforPassionCT]

That better well be a misquote. A potential customer did not pay money for a company to do research on them. Something has to be delivered to them. And if it is only a promise to be able to let them buy a car from them in 2008 than its fine. Otherwise, they better start refunding money now.

[SmartCard]

What was then is then, what is now is now.....
Obviously, this was before SMART knew the response would be huge. The plain fact the they are beginning to notify the customers from the "top" of the list, with promised delivery next Jan/Feb speaks for what is now. And, of course they cannot guarantee a car......just ask reservation #s 25000 to 30000 about this time next year.

[MicroNut]

One could look at it this way: the $99 reservation program is equitable to both parties. PAG doesn't guarantee to sell you a car and you don't guarantee to buy one.

In practice, it appears that the process is moving ahead in the order that reservations were placed, as SmartCard says.

[SmartBob]

That's been my concern all along. If Smarties are shipped across the country in Jan to various dealers and I, for example, keep in close touch with my dealer I may be able to buy a car in Jan. It may not be the exact color or config I originally reserved (to p/u in Sep '08) but it might still be fine provided the dealer doesn't gouge the hell out of the price.

Which brings me to my next concern. Can Mercedes lock the MSRP or can the dealers jack up the price as much as they want?

[tipo158]

Originally Posted by MicroNut

One could look at it this way: the $99 reservation program is equitable to both parties. PAG doesn't guarantee to sell you a car and you don't guarantee to buy one.

How is this different from a deposit?

What is the point of the $99 reservation program if it doesn't buy a place in line?

Despite anything that people may have nominally agreed to in the click-thru agreement when they placed their reservation, I bet that most people have some expectation that they are getting SOMETHING for $99 and it is called a reservation. Even if they have the first year sold, they still need to sell in the second year and so on and having thousands of pissed off reservation holders is not the way to do that.

In practice, it appears that the process is moving ahead in the order that reservations were placed, as SmartCard says.

I guess it is moving ahead. However, letting people move on to the next phase 300 at a time, how long is it going to take to work through 20000 reservations?

alan

[Ghetto2315]

This is what I have been told

Simply put, the $99 Reservation Fee Program is just a gauge on how much interest the general public has in purchasing the car. What happens is (I will use NJ since I live here) if the majority of the people in NJ do the $99 Reservation Fee than people in Florida, than SmartUSA will allocate more vehicles to NJ to sell than Florida and so on and so forth with each state depending on the amount of $99 Reservations each state has.

It does NOT guarantee you one... but betters your chances of being able to purchase one. Think of the $99 Reservation as a vote. The more votes in a state, the more vehicles are allocated to that state to sell than others...

[SmartCard]

Originally Posted by SmartBob

That's been my concern all along. If Smarties are shipped across the country in Jan to various dealers and I, for example, keep in close touch with my dealer I may be able to buy a car in Jan. It may not be the exact color or config I originally reserved (to p/u in Sep '08) but it might still be fine provided the dealer doesn't gouge the hell out of the price.

Which brings me to my next concern. Can Mercedes lock the MSRP or can the dealers jack up the price as much as they want?

To answer you last question first- SmartUSA has gone on record that the dealers will not charge over MSRP. (of course, maybe this only applies to original orders!?)

But you also bring up an interesting scenario - what if someone backs out on an order which was built and shipped for them - who will get that "unwanted" smartie? I guess it may depend upon where it is when it gets abandoned. I can relate two first hand instances:

I bought my first wife's PT cruiser during the first year of production. We "ordered" in July that first year (I believe first orders went in around March) with a $500 deposit. The order was not a firm factory order, it went on the dealers list, and waited to go to the factory based on dealer allocation. Some dealers went thru their list faster then others. Indeed many PTs came available during the year for one reason or another, and could often be had by some dealers, usually with a markup. Word of mouth spread on which dealers might have excess inventory. (my first introduction to internet forums- as archaeic as the where back in 2000!). So the bottom line was that you could "jump the line" and get a PT. We eventually got ours from a dealer in Pittsburgh (for no markup if I remember correctly) in December instead of our Louisville dealer in which our order was placed - which turned out to be a good move because by the following spring we were told that our order would not be allocated for the model year and our deposit was refunded.

Case in point #2: I ordered my MINI in 2004, as the initial craze was subsiding. Still, your dealer order sat and waited to get into the factory build que, but the wait was only a couple months to do so. However two days after I place my order with the dealer, she called me up and said they had found practically my identical car, sitting unclaimed in the New Jersey lot where the get off the boat from. Eventally it was a cancelled order that made it stateside. I had my Mini within a month of placing my order.

So what might happen with unclaimed Smarties -will they be up for grabs, offered to the next person on the dealers list....who knows?