You might be sorry you asked...
My Camaro story was more like a nightmare until last week when I finally raised enough hell to get things moving.
I would say it was a mess of my own doing but it was more of a case of who would ever think ordering a car could be such a mess.
My saga began Apr 11, 2009 when I decided before GM went bankrupt to get a new car, I have been in GM's for 20-25 years now, but since they killed the 2 door Grand Prix and the supercharged V6 version that I have now there was no GM car I like for the first time in all this time. Then last year I saw the Camaro and said, ok there is my next car.
So I wait until they are in production and actually moved sooner than I planned but thought I would throw some bucks GM's way since I was going to get a GM anyway and went dealer shopping after building a Camaro on the GM web site. So I had it all dialed in to just what I wanted, I printed that all out and started calling dealers.
My first clue that this might turn out poorly was when the first dealer I called said he would only take orders for the 2SS and wanted 3K above MSRP. However I still had no clue as to how this mess of a system worked.
So I find a dealer willing to take a 2LT order, buy then I knew about allocations only at the very high level, meaning, dealers I had spoken with had mentioned that had no allocation so they could not take an acutal order but would put me on a waiting list, or like the first one, who lied and said he only had allocations for the one model.
The dealer I find seemed great, I asked if they had allocations that would let them order a 2LT not knowing that the other dealer had lied, the "good" dealer said sure, come on down, so I did.
We made the deal in less than an hour, they took my printout and came up with a sales contract, offered me a really good price on my trade in and said the wait was 6-8 weeks, but that most of their orders were delivered in 6 weeks since they were such a large dealer, big lie.
At 6 weeks I call to see if I fell on the lucky side, which still not clue about this Workbench order number deal, the real meaning of allocations, and no concept of the "process". The dealer tells me it is looking good should be any day now, they will call when it comes in.
I wait another 2 weeks to ask how it is looking, this time I got a dance, well, you know since they bankruptcy, things all slowed down, but they should be ok in a week or two so my car will be another 2 weeks tops. Of course that did not happen and now I am at 10 weeks.
Then it started getting real hard to get either my salesman or the sales manager any more so I call GM Customer Care line, talk about a waste of a good dime... They were totally useless and it was about this time I knew Houston had a problem.
A couple of weeks ago my dealer made a mistake, two actually, one was thinking that one of the cars that they had an order number for was mine and the second one was telling me about this site so I could track my order.
I gave the number to The Viz and to my surpise he comes back with a status in like 15 minutes, in that time I cruised the site a bit and then knew I was in trouble. But when my status came back as 3800, with a VIN, I went to the online spreadsheed in the those with a VIN thread and looked up my car, it was not my car, in fact not even one of the details matched my order.
So I ask The Viz if perhaps he had given me the worng VIN, nope, he cut and pasted the info from whatever his source is so it was clear it was not a typo.
I call the dealer who actually takes my call thinking everything is rosey now and tell him that the order number he gave me lead to the wrong car. He says oh he must of read the wrong line off the computer, he would call me back with the right number, a call of course I never got.
All I could get was voice mail when I tried ot reach him for days, and when I went in person wouldn't you know but the "GM" computers were down...
Finally I started really raising hell, calling and emailing Customer Care without mercy, same to the dealer, and snail mail to every address in GM I could find.
I am not sure if this helped or hurt but after my blitz campaign, last week things broke open and Customer Care called me with the right number, they gave me the wrong status but at least had the right number.
I gave that to The Viz, who again responded in no time with a status of 3000 and a TPW of 9/7/09. I asked him if he would look up the details since it did not have a VIN so I could see if it was the right car this time, he did, great guy, and it was the right car.
So now I am good, I have never really been in a hurry to get it my Grand Prix is great, all I wanted was a striaght answer, even if the dealer had told me on the second or third calls that things happened and it was going to take a few months, I would have been fine, I even told him, just tell me what is really going on, but I guess if you are a dishonest person at heart you don't trust anyone else, so he probably figured if he told me the truth I would cancel, I wouldn't have and didn't even with all his BS.
In any event that is my Camaro story, I figure I am at least two months from the car if all goes well, and longer if not, but at least I know I am in the real pipeline and past the first codes, so I am good.
I came ot this thread as it was one of the few that did not seem to have clear posting rules to post a test message after I uploaded my car icon and put in a footer for my messages to see if it worked. My first message here was "Test".
Then the fun started, met a lot of great folks in this thread that has taken a lot of the sting out of the initial experience and I am a happy camper again, not bad for a ho thread
