Rate your buying experience/dealer for the preorder.

Three of our local dealers that I contacted all said that the only price they would accept was MSRP. I'm very happy that I finally ended up at one of the Priuschat Certified dealers; Andre at Putnam Toyota, Burlingame!

Anyone in the SF Bay Area that has not found a dealer and wants a no-hassle experience, should give Putnam a call! It was quick and easy; Thanks Andre!

So, to rate my buying experience... A1

 

Roger, thank yoU! MANY of us had no idea what the system flow would look like.

I saw many emails (I was CC'ed on all mail) that said order is made, and then there is a subsequent one that said order confirmed - but they were all the same. No one's name shows, no car shows up to correlate...

I had to presume that you folks were all getting your own individual emails to acknowledge the fact that you're in the system waiting for dealer action, and then after I click, calculate and send, you got another email that said "ok, go back and confirm" ...

As I said before, had Toyota revealed what YOU were doing and seeing to us as a dealer group, it would have made communication far easier. I'd have had a helper on my left just emailing on my iPad and calling on my phone touching base to say all was well.

If any one of my clients felt "unloved" or unimportant yesterday, please don't take it personally. It was pretty crazy and there was no way to know when you were getting the system generated emails.

Dianne

 

Dianne Whitmire at Carson Toyota- The best!

I selected Longo Toyota, which boosted as the largest TOYOTA dealer. I waited for almost two days---nothing happened.

Fortunately, Carson Toyata is around 20 miles away from my place.

Dianne did the job within a few minutes! Amazing!

 

Dianne Whitmire, outstanding!

 

Surfin Joe!

 

My experience was similar. Toyota Website issues D-
Toyota of San Bernardino A

 

Considering it was a new system, I think it went decently well, even though it took probably 30+ minutes to process my order after Dianne confirmed it. It's also too bad it seems a lot of dealers didn't have their stuff together...

I hope Toyota and other makers start selling more cars like this.

Dealer, Dianne @ Carson: A+ of course.
Website: B+

 

At first, I selected South Bay Toyota as my dealership (since I know a couple of guys that work in the service department there), but since they didn't seem to be on the ball with the PiP pre-sale process AND they wanted to charge full MSRP too, I decided to go with Dianne Whitmire at Carson Toyota.

My experience with Dianne was fantastic. Not only did she process my pre-order super quickly (within minutes), she spent a lot of time answering my questions about the order process and about the car. It's not every day that you find a salesperson that will talk you out of unnecessarily spending extra money, but that's exactly what Dianne did for me. Instead of spending an extra $8K on the "advanced" trim, she suggested that I go with an after market, real leather option for only $1,200. Sure, there's a lot of other goodies in the "advanced" trim, but nothing neither of us really thought warranted the extra cost.

The day after Dianne processed my pre-order, she took some time out of her busy schedule to show me, in person, some leather samples and answered a few more questions I had about the carpool sticker. She even showed me what she had to do for each PiP pre-order confirmation (which it turned out to be a pretty cumbersome process that involves navigating through multiple screens, manually refreshing order statuses, and a lot of cutting & pasting information to send out emails), so considering the order volume she was dealing with, it's certainly impressive that she was able to provide such exceptional service to the majority of us who ordered through her. Needless to say, Dianne exceeded every expectation and I left her office knowing that I got a great deal, reassured that everything was processed correctly, and confident that I have a salesperson that I can trust. Simply put, if you're in the market for a new Toyota and are within driving distance of Carson Toyota, I would highly recommend coming to see Dianne.

 

You know, I see some serious possibility there. What you mention about clicking and being able to build your own and submit a request online and have it accepted or countered... that's pretty mch what I expect to be the wave of the future.
The one caveat to that is that the factory would have to be responsible to accept BACK any strangely configured vehicle if a consumer cancelled.
But, that system has its possibilities!!!
It would also permit Toyota to gauge demand on certain vehicles in each geographic area.

 

Dianne W. of Carson Toyota stole the deal from Irvine Toyota! Irvine was just clueless - and I visited them several times ahead of the order window... (literally begging them to take my money...)

Dianne delivered 100% - Spot on! Thank you.

 

Dianne Whitemire did a good job for me too. My order was placed & confirmed all within 11 or so minutes of the order window having opened.

I work at an Internet Service Provider and having read many of the comments regarding trouble receiving timely order-related email messages and the difficulties with ordering the PHEV on the Toyota web site, I can recognize many of the underlying reasons those problems occurred, as I've had a good deal of first hand experience with those same types of issues.

As Internet users, we've all had our expectations set over the years that email is supposed to be instantaneous delivery. But the reality is that there is no magic technical switch that guarantees email will be delivered within a short period of time. Email delivery is best effort, and always has been. Best effort delivery can mean anything from a few minutes to days. It all depends on how quickly the mail servers at two ISPs (the sender & the recipient) wish to exchange mail with each other. Throw in anti-spam & anti-malware scanning into the mix and speedy delivery times can become elusive. While it could be argued that Toyota could have added more outgoing mail servers, and I suspect they will the next time around given that many of us seemed to have received an email notification at 3 or 4 pm in the afternoon that the 9 am order window opened, any order process that relies on email notifications is always going to be a bit unpredictable.

As for the trouble that many had ordering the PHEV on the Toyota site, from many of the posts I read, much of that seems to have come down to web browser caching & cookie issues. Caching is usually a major performance boost when browsing a web site, but it can be very frustrating when it's preventing someone from seeing up-to-date content on a site. Likewise, web browser cookies maintain the "state" of your session with the web server, so for those of us who logged in to the PHEV site prior to the order window opening, or clicked the configure link before logging in once the order window did open, deleting the cookie that toyota.com sets on your computer & clearing your browser's cache would've been the magic bullet. But, I think Toyota will learn from that experience too, as there is a means available to program a web site, such as the PHEV order site, to auto expire any previously set cookies & to auto expire any prior cached content. This is in fact common practice on sites that have time sensitive material, such as sites that sell concert tickets or news sites. Several posts said that after they switched from one browser to another, they were able to order. The reason that helped, was because the other web browser that was used, didn't have the cookies or cached content from a prior visit to the PHEV site.

One other bit of insight that I think would help dealers in the next go round would be to consider using a tool like Team Viewer or Log Me In to temporarily share the screen of their customers. I've been on countless support calls myself where being able to see someone's screen can solve a problem in 1-2 minutes compared to 30-60 minutes of describing what someone is seeing on their screen.

I think in the end though, most everyone (excluding perhaps some of less prepared dealers out there) did the best they could & the PHEV ordering process was a good first shot at an efficient ordering process.

 

well, my 96 hours are up. never heard back from bernardi toyota of framingham ma.
i went there saturday after spending most of the day on the phone with them friday. they just didn't get it. claimed they never got an email from toyota even tho i printed it out showing them as my selected dealer. they kept insisting that i give them a non refundable $2,500. deposit and they would put me first on the list for when their allocation comes in. they were supposed to contact toyota today and clear it all up, but i never heard back from them. looks like i'll be driving the 08 for awhile.

 

Oh Biscotti. :: sigh ::

I'm so sorry that dealer experience wasn't good. I can try to help. I did offer to talk to them for you. I still can.

 

Dianne, Being a Dealer, you have an answer I need.

My Auto Broker's Toyota contact works at the Dealer's Lexus site. So I went to the Lexus office before the Pre-order time to use his PC and enter my order, thinking I would be there to quickly reply to the next step.

However, he didn't have a clue what or why Toyota was doing it this way AND their Toyota Manager was on VACATION !!! So after I got my Conf# 110, I waited 24 hours for the Toyota Manager to enter the order. But I didn't get the email until more calls between me and my salesman and he to the Toyota Manager, who kept saying he placed the order. Yet the Toyota page didn't have the Confirm button. 5 more hours later, my salesman drove to the Toyota Manager's location, and they re-did something and then I got the email from Toyota and the Toyota page now had the Confirm button allowing me to Accept the Order and get the Complete email from Toyota.

So my Question, How were you trained for the Procedure? What did you get from Toyota to indicate someone had pre-ordered and listed you as the Dealer? Then, what did you actually do to enter the order, that generated the email from Toyota back to the client?

Thanks,

 

I paid $38,905. Straight forward experience with the dealer I used.

 

Does that include the $760 Delivery/handling fee?

 

Yes. The extra I have to pay is the DMV doc fee(~$60) and tax. This not an ad but I think they are fair and I want to share with priuschatter here!

 

thanks dianne,like everyone says, you're the bestest! i hate to bother people (other than with caustic emails) they claim they worked it out with toyota, but getting info is like pulling teeth and i still have no confirmation. i like the biscotti tho, might have to change my handle!

 

My chiming in here is pointless.

 

My experience with the website and ordering was very straight forward. My dealer (Toyota of Temecula Valley) was unprepared for any of this. I had to make a personal appearance to walk them through the process and push them to get there end of the deal done. I had gone into the dealership last week to warn them that I would be using them for the pre-order and ordering of a PIP. They took no steps in learning what they had to do at their end. I think they could have made just a little effort (say 10 minutes of their time) to accommodate me and other who were ordering the PIP. They chose not to. I told them I was disappointed. They did make a tacit effort once I showed up on their doorstep and complained. The sales manager made his entries into the system which took 10 minutes because he had to read the instructions. Website gets a B. The dealer gets a D.