[JRTJH]

"As for walking away from the order because the dealer can sell to someone else, I’m not sure that’s always the case. Some will want a down payment, some will not."

Consider this: Dealerships are "screaming for inventory" and the factory is putting their "screams" on the back burner, trying to produce "customer orders which have been sold". The priority at the assembly plants is to fill the "sold orders" before building vehicles to sit on a lot, with hopes to find a buyer...

So, dealerships "lure customers" to special order a vehicle, take a minimal deposit that they often say is refundable, and put in the order... That gives the dealership a "priority order to either sell or put in inventory"... As was said in a previous post, "the dealer said that if I don't want it, they'll give me back my deposit because they can sell it as soon as it hits the lot"... The problem for most dealers is that they don't have anything on the lot to sell and if they can "find a way to get inventory" they have buyers waiting.

Yesterday, I went by the Ford and by the Chevrolet/GMC dealerships. There were only 3 new vehicles in front of the Ford showroom. One Escape, one Fuzion and one regular cab Ranger. Over on the used car side, there were about 10 vehicles, only 1 of which was a Ford.

Lots at the Chevy and at the GMC dealer were similar, a few SUV's and a couple of cars, no HD trucks and sparse LT trucks, most of which looked like "Fleet Sales" regular cab, stripped down utility trucks rather than option heavy crew cabs.

I'd guess that a major part of the "push by local dealers to get customers to special order" is with the hope that the vehicle will at least be in their inventory even if the customer backs out of the order.