When new vehicles come out how soon before manufacturers come out with incentives. Right now only financing incentives are listed. Does December bring better incentives even though the model is new? Considering purchasing in December in hopes of incentives/cash back type stuff. My assumption is Labor Day weekend won't help with any deals for the Ascent due to popularity and being so new. Thoughts?
What is this mysterious cash back you mention? Oh, that's what a company that doesn't sell literally 100% of everything they make has to do.
Car & Driver had a cute little comment about Subaru having 79 months in a row of continuous growth, something none of us have seen since before puberty.
Based upon how things are going with the Ascent, you probably won't see any real quantities on dealers lots until sometime in 2020. I've said this on here before - when the Outback did the model change to the 2015 model in July of '14, and Eyesight cars weren't available until September of '14, we went until March of 2016 with ZERO Outback inventory on the ground. You'd come in, test drive a service loaner, we'd order you the car, and it'd show up in 8 weeks or so. Forester did that for 9 months during body style change in the fall of '13, to the 2014 model. Crosstrek is darned near doing that now.
Because people are used to what OTHER car companies end up doing, they assume that it works this way with Subaru as well, that we'll have huge inventories on the ground at end of model year to 'get rid of'. That doesn't happen with us. Never has. Outback this year has gone from the 2018 to the 2019 model year, I have 10 left right now, and we'll probably sell all of those by the end of next week.
Inventory (stock) units are sent to us by Subaru. If they come from Indiana, we're able to use an internal system on Subienet to change some things on those stock units, but we can't change the model mix. So I could change the color or a few accessories, but I can't change a sunroof car for a non-sunroof car. That's for stock units. Order units I can pick what the model is, but those also count against our unit allocation. They can (and do) adjust our allocations based upon results - we got more allocated to us because we've been so successful in selling them. Right now I have 32 Ascents showing on my pipeline, 8 of those are NOT order units - so hopefully by the end of September I'll actually have a couple on the ground we can sell without having to order. Also, using Subienet, I can see what's out there at OTHER dealers - that's how we arrange dealer trades. There are a few out there in the wild, but they are few and far between. Keep in mind I'm in OKC - so within 400 miles of me, there are a bunch of other dealerships. (There's 13 in Texas alone that I can (and do) trade with - that's not counting San Antonio or Houston, those are too far away to for me to trade with.)
Here's an example - KCE 21, 11 different colors choices. There are 13 TOTAL available for sale right now within 400 miles of me. KCE 23's, there's 7. And most of those are 300 plus miles from me. That's it, for ALL the colors. Outbacks, JDF 24 (2018 2.5i with eyesight and moonroof), there's 29 black ones on the ground within 400 miles of me. Heck, there's 19 of the 2019's in that color alone. 48 of just ONE color.
