[soundman98]

another anecdotal story. my brother worked at a chrysler jeep dodge, and then was transferred to the companies newly built fiat/alfa romeo store as it's lead tech.

this was around that time when dodge started releasing the hellcat and other super-powered specialty vehicles, as well as people excited for alfa to finally be back in the states. so while he pulled cars in and out of the service area, he routinely heard stories of people wanting to put money down to pre-order any one of these more specialty vehicles, usually complete with when the cars would be be shipping to dealers, and what colors were available.

in almost all cases with the parent company now known as 'stelanis', all of the dealer employee's would almost always first learn of when a new model was going to be coming to them based on customers walking in the front door looking to put down a deposit.

he once said that (pre-)stelanis would be mum about release dates and such, to the point that most dealers didn't know what they were getting until the truck would show up with the vehicles on them.

so in a lot of cases, a pre-order agreement is with the dealer only, and is only an agreement to consume one of their unit allotments, of which they might not actually have any knowledge of until the car shows up on the truck for delivery.

just some food for thought before you start throwing money at random storefronts.