Yea, MN, I understand the disclaimer but there has to be more to it in my mind. Let's see, Penske is the official distributor/dealership chain and SCoA is the . . . ________ what? Advertiser, marketing unit, ???
More unknowns that hopefully will be cleared up when the local dealer calls. This fall.
tm
Shack01,
I had the same basic confusion as their site was offering a $55 early reservation fee so I was not sure which one or both were legitimate. I even wrote both an email indicating the confusion and neither returned the email.
For now, I must consider as you have just remaining confused until the dealer calls me to come sign the papers. I already know who that will be but the dealer has not received official confirmation that they will be as yet. I think that will come later in the Fall as the GM of the dealership told me that their becoming the dealer was not yet finalized. This same dealer hosted the Smart Car tour in late July so I thought that was a good sign that they will eventually become the dealer.
On another subject, I went onto the site and filled in the survey but never got any word back. I didn't get an invitation to the showing at this dealership either....found out about it from some coworkers who happened to see it going on as it is near my workplace. I sure hope my reservation didn't get dropped thru the cracks as I reserved on March 20th, #322571XXXX.
My anxiety to get my own increases as time goes on as well so you are not alone, Shack01! Time and patience will tell....
My confirmation e-mail came on the 22nd of March, so we're in the same time frame. At least you have a potential dealer lined up. The Las Vegas tour stop was held at the Fashion Show Mall! so no hint yet of who's on deck for being the local dealer.
Curious that your partial number is not even close to mine. Must be some super secret code embedded in the digits.
My understanding is that the only company authorized by MB to distribute the car is Smart USA (UAG, Penske Affiliate). If you paid any amount of money to anybody else for a "reservation, kiss your money good bye. Smartcar of America, Inc. is nothing more than a commercially owned forum set up to promote the products of sponsors. They attract the sponsors by creating a targetable user community that would be interested in the sponsors' products. In this case Smart Car aftermarket products and maybe even grey market car sellers.
I haven't seen much anti-Penske flaming on this forum, just a bit of angst and frustration from some who are impatient for the introduction of the car.
But while I agree that most people on these forums are not really pro- or anti-Penske Group, SCoA itself seems to be adopting a strongly negative tone. Here are couple of propaganda gems culled from the various SCoA sites:
"Unfortunately, if customer services resemble the existing attitude and improvised remarks implemented by those in charge of the 2008 Smart cars launch, the Americas love for the Smart may not be as we had anticipated."
"Not since, when it was announced that the Mini Cooper was on its way has a car caused such a buzz. However, the 2008 Smart Fortwo could have the distinction of being the most misinformed, confusing, and problematic car introduction to date."
There was a serious lack of valid information at the introduction of the MINI as well, and a lot of erroneous information was being disemminated on the enthusiast sites such as NAM and MINI2. I don't take too much stock in the random speculation, but will do some myself. When I have real information, I try to post images of official releases made by MB, Smart USA, UAG, Penske a dealer that may have been awarded a franchise. I also scraped up a court document to post showing the relationship between Smart and UAG.
I tried to take the survey but when I pressed the Vote button, I was prompted to run some ActiveX add-on, which I declined (due to extreme paranoia on my part about downloading unknown stuff to my PC). Anyone else experience this? Did the download? Still have a working PC?
A couple of thoughts on the survey itself:
More detail questions about the test drive might be useful (how did you find the gearchange, ride, noise, comfort, fit and finish, etc.)
A question about what options you would like (versus what options are available). Consider this part of my campaign for "give us cruise control"...
Other than that, I would seriously suggest they hire someone who creates surveys for a living for version 3. The overall intent of the survey seemed fine, but it really needs work in terms of meaningful results.
As an example, if you want to know how people feel about a particular issue (e.g. PAG's communication of pricing info), ask a question in the form: "How satisfied are you with xxxx...." and have them select from Very Satisfied, Somewhat Satisfied, etc. That way you can come up with a meaningful statistical representation of the results (....95% of those surveyed were Dissatified or Very Dissatisfied with xxxx).
This is a Smart Car of America survey, from their website www.iwantasmartcar.com. I've not heard of any "official" PAG survey to date. Not sure that it'll really be of much benefit, despite SCoA's hype. The questions are so vague and unstructured that getting any meaningful results from the back end will be hard (other than deeply insightful stuff like "most people want a blue one...").
That said, I don't mind participating so long as isn't going to download some crap onto my PC.
Hey guys, I just wanted to comment on SCoA's feeling of smart USA.
Obviously everyone has mixed feelings but us here at SCoA want nothing more then to have this car in our possession and if means leaning on PAG and Smart USA, we are all for it but by no means do we mean any harm or negativity towards PAG.
We want to see the smart car, thats pretty much the bottom line. I hope that everyone here wanting one as bad as I gets one next year but its a great possibility that not everyone will get one. This is something I wish we could change but unfortunately we can not. All we can hope for is that the car makes it to America, the general population loves it and that the Smart Brand grows bringing us additional smart models like the roadster, the deisel and maybe even a whole new model smart.
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Let's see, Penske is the official distributor/dealership chain and SCoA is the . . . ________ what? Advertiser, marketing unit, ??? 
so no hint yet of who's on deck for being the local dealer. 
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