Quote Originally Posted by Martin View Post
Honestly, I have nothing personal against Gerry Wood Dodge or FCA, but I do think the situation is a little shady. I've talked to dealers, and this situation was not well communicated. If FCA had notified all the dealers that an interested party was about to snatch up all the remaining production capacity, and told the dealers that they had X amount of time to contact their customers and get their orders in, that would have been the right thing to do. There were a lot of people out there going through the back-and-forth one-of-one process of getting color chips, approving them, etc. Many of those orders got cancelled - and that is shitty to say the least. These customers and dealers were playing by the rules - "sold order" cars, following the somewhat complicated and time consuming one-of-one process as mandated by FCA, and they got hosed.

From what I'm hearing from several sources, the GW deal was not communicated to the dealers - they all got blindsided by it. That put them in a bad situation - they now have pissed off customers, and the customers have to go to an unfamiliar non-local dealer to do a deal.

Sure, everyone "should have seen the writing on the wall" but that really isn't realistic. We've all seen rumors of "the end of the world" so many times that we take it with a grain of salt. If FCA had sent an official and strongly worded notice to the dealers of what was about to happen, and given them time to contact customers, this whole mess could have been avoided. It was just horribly mis-managed - and that is sad since it sends the Viper out on a bad note.


Just want to be clear that we didn't "scoop up the remainder of production". We placed these orders starting August 1 through Sept 28. That's a two month period where everyone had a chance to order cars. We did not ask to "order all the Vipers". We didn't "corner the market". We simply took a temperature of what the market was doing and over nearly 60 days were ordering cars for inventory that we thought we could sell.

Again, people love conspiracy theories and want to watch train wrecks. Unfortunately this story is neither. It's just a Dodge dealer ordering cars for sale, which at the end turned out to be a big story.

Once we realized we were "pot committed" we then decided it's time to get proactive in selling cars and did the Press Release.

I will tell you this, the orders WERE NOT coming in (legit, deposit orders). Lots of tongue wagging and talk, but not much in the way of orders.

That's the acid test folks.