I rode my bike over to Corwin Ford today (Saturday), to see if there was any word on our special order van and to discuss how short our timeline is becoming. The dealer told me that our van is nowhere to be found and offered a rather nebulous excuse - that perhaps there had been some part of the assembly line that was out of whack when our van was built, in effect resulting in a small number of defective vehicles. Or the van had been damaged in shipment and had been scrapped. Supposedly Ford knows, but won't give any details. As such, it would seem to be likely that there had been some sort of manufacturing problem. Regardless, all indications are that our van's VIN has been erased from Ford's database (if they aren't just feeding us more b.s.). The fact that I found out on a Saturday has me wondering why I wasn't notified sooner, especially since I had told them after our last set of interactions that I'd wait to hear from them. Something is clearly not right, and the dealer and/or Ford is not being candid about what is going on.
After hearing this, the prospect suddenly became very real that we would not be starting our trip on time. Our salesman figured that, after all our heartache over trying to get a van, that we'd want to go out and buy from a competing brand. We told him that we were not interested in that, that we had far too much invested in this van, plus the competitor's vans all were inferior in one or more regards (mainly less horsepower, torque and/or cargo space). And we had no real desire to start over with a different Ford dealer, where we would likely pay significantly more, given our need for a quick solution.
So he once again searched inventory, not expecting any great change from when he had looked a couple of weeks ago. But as luck would have it, there is a van in Oregon that, in every aspect that is important to us, is just like our special order van. It doesn't have splash guards and it has several hundred dollars in additional options (most of which we had almost considered adding to our build, but narrowly decided not to), but at this point we are very relieved that we lucked into finding such a close fit. It is interesting to note that it had rolled off the assembly line a week or two after our van was put on a ship.
This time they were willing to eat the cost of transferring the vehicle from the other dealer, and there was no hassle about getting the rebates that we qualify for, or about getting the same discount as our special order van. We suspect Ford has sweetened the pot for them to keep us satisfied, though obviously we aren't seeing any of that (at least not directly). But we feel lucky that, this late in the game, we'll have a van that we can be satisfied with.
The van could be here as early as Monday, but we've been told it will be here by Wednesday at the latest. We are stuck having to trade in our CX-5, though we'll first see if an interested neighbor would be willing to buy it for roughly a thousand dollars more than what we'll net from the dealer. It would be a fantastic deal for them and would cut our losses a bit.
So we now have a small degree of certainty. We'll definitely be in Seattle a week from Friday and we will be departing on our adventure the following morning. We would have liked a leisurely, week long trip to Seattle where we would have had time to catch up with several old friends, but that won't be possible. And taking two days to get to Tacoma won't be bad, leaving us a very short trip to Seattle on Friday.
We will have a lot to do this week. Monday afternoon is the lender's appraisal. Wednesday is when we do the final packing before the movers show up on Thursday morning. In addition to all that, we still hope to get the polka dot graphics applied, get the drawer pedestal and other storage items installed in the van, and find the time to put 1,000 break-in miles on the engine. We figure we'll accomplish the latter by taking extended drives in the evening, and probably at least one long drive next weekend.
With luck our next post will feature a picture of our new van as we pick it up from the dealer...
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