Craig, I've heard you mention this before....I'm curious.. What do you mean when you say the cars were reallocated? When you say they cancelled, you mean DC? And the dealer had no knowledge of how that happened? And then you say "so instead of going through and purchasing... we cancelled" Do you mean instead of ordering again? I mean, how can you cancel if DC already did? If that's the case, getting cancelled and asked to reorder I would have done the same thing! Is there any wild chance this was a dealer game to give them to a higher bidder if you guys had a great deal? I doubt it, as a know your dad is a serious collector and probably had the dealer nailed down pretty good. But can you expound a little on how this went down so the rest of us can be wary, it sounds like the only deal I have heard like this, all the other troubles seem to have evolved from the car coming to the dealer and then the dealer getting greedy and trying to screw the cert holder. This is really unique in that the dealer seems to have been screwed too. Can you elaborate a little or as they say is this "in litigation" If it is an IM would be good.
Thanks Lee,
I can post it all out in the open, the more people that read it the better.
Regarding our dealer selling it out from underneath it I would say that it just isn't possible for that to happen. We've been purchasing all our fleet (including the other Vipers in our family) since the early 90's and we're more friends with him than a customer. He not only gave us an awesome price (dealer invoice + $500) he even offered to give the same deal to anyone else that wanted it on a new SRT, he's more interested in Viper sales than making $$ off them.
As for our car getting cancelled, the dealer told us that 1 of our 2 SRT's appeared on his list of cars that were going into production. The car was on there for maybe a week and then disappeared. He was not notified of why this was happening. After much research on his part he was told taht the orders for 03 had been cancelled and were being re-allocated for 04's (Funny how I never heared about this happening to anyone else) and that we would be first in line for an 04. Well that would be great if we wanted an 04 but we wanted an 03 and we were pretty ticked that all this had happened without someone from Chrysler letting us know what was going on. So once our dealer told us that we were out of luck for an 03 he told us that we could get an 04 but at this point frustration was too highg and we just said forget it to both orders. By the time we'd get the car the snow would probably be close to flying and we would have paid for a car so it could sit there in the garage until may. How much fun is that?
The whole point of my dwelling on this isn't to get the cars built or anything lke that. The possibility for that is long gone. The $$ that was going to get used to purchase our 1 of the 2 SRT's will get used for something else. After getting ****** around it doesn't really inspire my dad to write DC a check for $115K
I just hope that people can read this and then know WHY it is that the CHRYSLER side of DC is losing in excess of a billion dollars, if you're treating the people who are spending the equivilant of 4 intrepids (and who need a new truck soon as well) like this it's easy to see why.
I think a lot of this problem can be attributed to that fact that a Viper to chrysler canada is pretty much nothing. There is no canadian Viper HQ just some idiot on the end of a phone with no training on the car or any ability to track down a problem and get back to you. If Chrysler Canada would just assign and train 2 or 3 people to handle everything Viper in this country it would sure help the owners up her a lot, right now we have nothing backed by only a handful of Viper friendly dealerships.
I'm not saying DC should kiss our azzes but I don't see what's so hard about keeping us informed on our cars. We get information about fleet cars and specials all the time (we have more borcures on the caravan than I care to count) HEck our dealer even phoned Viper HQ only to be told he should be dealing with someone in canada!
Here's to hoping the Ford GT will be plentiful!
