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?
