Hello Camaro5 folks!
I decided that I would go to my dealer today and see if I could place an order and then when they finally offer blue I would change the color on the order at a later date.
I had been reluctant do order one thinking I would be depriving another person of a car but I figured if there were any left on his allocation by now that everyone who was truly a die-hard would have ordered already and I wouldn't feel guilty if I ordered one and had to cancel it if they don't offer blue.
So, I went to the dealer and the salesman I normally see was not there so another guy offered to help me. I asked him what his allocation was and he said that GM has not given out that information, and they won't give it out for a long time. He said that dealers may get a showroom car in April or May but they had doubts that production would begin until the summer.
I asked the guy why he didn't know his allocation and he said that that information was not being given out. I said he could check on chevylaunch.com and find out and he said that they have been checking constantly but the info is just not there.
He then told me that nobody in my area would be seeing Camaros for the better part of the year because most of the dealers that get them would be the big dealers in major cities like NYC, LA, etc. He said that those dealers will surely ration them out with a $30K markup.
He told me that they could take a deposit like some dealers are but that just means I'd be giving them money to play around with indefinitely because they had no idea when the cars would actually start getting built and they couldn't place any orders not even for their own dealer stock.
He assured me that since they had hired a new sales guy 2 years ago that specialized in selling Corvettes that they were assured of a great allocation because of the high volume of vettes they had sold in the past 2 years which was huge compared to other local dealers. I just had to wait for GM to tell them their allocation.
I then said I didn't want to call him a liar but several of my friends on Camaro5.com has already placed orders and were even given order numbers and knew what place they had on their dealer allocations. Some guys were #1 out of 5, other guys were #2 out of 3, and so on. The guy told me to "forget what you read on the internet." and "it's all a bunch of B.S." and that nobody was given any allocation and all dealers were doing was taking deposits to "reserve a space in line" for when GM finally gave out allocations.
He said he would be happy to take a deposit from me to reserve my place in line and that he had several other guys foaming at the mouth as well but he talked them out of it too. But if I was really that eager they would be glad to take my money and give me a slip of paper saying I was reserving my place for when allocations become available. He said that he was "doing a favor" for me by not taking money from me and that dealers that were supposedly taking orders were going to have all that money to "play around with" and were ripping enthusiasts off by leading them on like that.
I just wanted to put that out there and see if any of you had any reaction to what my dealer was saying and perhaps if I had miscommunicated to him in some way what I wanted or misunderstood what he was saying. This dealer has been serving my family for 30 years and always has been good so I am saddened by the fact that what he says seems to be so my different than what I read here.
Of coruse he did warn me to not pay any attention to the internet...
