Last year the DOW might have been at it's lowest but today the overall economy is still there ...or even lower. Can't tell you how many people are out of work and still losing there jobs. My prediction is that later this year oct-nov, will be even better time to buy house or auto than today!

 

If you go out there and look at the inventory of 2010 cars at the different dealers it would appear that there is a lot of stock sitting on the lot. Take this local dealer to me for instance, they have over 60 2010 cars on the lot:

http://porsche-exchange.porschedeale...che/search.php

That certainly tells a different story than what we have been hearing about constrained allocation and production on 2010 cars.

 

Other than dealers and those wanting to sell, where is the basis in fact that Porsche has reduced supply for 2010? This seems to be passed as common knowledge, but where are the facts?
There was a Wall St Journal article back in early Dec. 09 headlined as "Want to Buy a Porsche on the Cheap" where a dealer is quoting the common belief:

"Porsche has turned off the spigot of supply," he says. "The allocation is very small to the U.S. They are going to other parts of the world."

But then the article concludes with a Porsche rep:

"A Porsche spokesman says the company adjusts allocations "all the time" but has no plans to cut shipments to the U.S."

Thoughts??

 

There's a lot of sources making thse claims http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLP56414020081125
http://carstrends.com/reviews/report...roduction-cut/

The actual supply numbers are not indicated but regardless with no programs or incentives the cars can not be discounted .In July they had such over supply that there were excess cars at the port .That was the time to buy the 997S .

 

You can buy off the lot but try to build a Cayman, a GT3 or turbo. Nothing to be had. You have to search and/or your dealer has to trade for building slot and we are just in march.

 

These lists typically represent cars that are accessible to the dealer and not necessarily on their lot. While the cars are primarily unspoken for it doesn't mean that every dealer in the country has 60 cars in their physical inventory for sale. The heading on the page states "The following New Vehicles are available or en route to our dealership:" They don't even have pictures of most of them and "available" doesn't mean in our inventory.

 

One thought that comes to mind is if these low sales numbers continue to stay flat or even drop further because of the limited production and thus low, low inventories for the dealers to sell, what will this mean to the dealers themselves and the ability to stay in business. Their fixed costs don't go down - i.e., their building lease, insurance, utilities, salaries (I guess their sales people could get let go), etc. Will we see dealerships close?

 

The Porsche website does actually give a pretty good representation of a dealership's inventory I have found. If you want to see more actual pictures look here:
http://www.porschexchange.com/web/in...body_types/New

Granted the Porsche Exchange may not be a good representation as they are a very high volume dealership. Just for the record I have never bought a vehicle there.

 

I just checked out the Porsche investor relations site regarding their first half of fiscal 09/10, and they say,

"An analysis of the sales territories reveals that the situation on the North American market remains difficult. Whereas the unit sales of Porsche will fall by 16 percent in the region to a prospective volume of approx. 11,000 vehicles, the drop in Europe should no more than 6 percent. Here the preliminary figures reveal sales of approx. 10,200 units. In the rest of the world, sales of Porsche have actually grown again. According to the preliminary reports, unit sales in the first six months of the current fiscal year come to approx. 12,000 vehicles, reflecting growth of 18 percent.
Manufacturing output on the basis of the preliminary figures for the period should reach a total of 40,877 units, almost reaching the same level as the prior year, indicating a fall of 1.9 percent. Up until the end of the period under report 16,979 units of the Cayenne and 9,882 of the new Panamera will have rolled off the assembly line in Leipzig. In the same time then 8,746 units of the 911 were manufactured. A total of 5,270 units of the Boxster will be manufactured in the period." (Full article at: http://www.porsche-se.com/pho/en/new...&id=2010-01-29)

Based on this its pretty much impossible to tell what their allocations are, but given that their projections are that they'll sell around 11,000 vehicles, they'll probably stock just a bit more than that for inventory purposes.

 

I ordered my car in early June and the salesman also explained that 2010 allocations were going to be really tight. He said I wouldn't get my car until November and he was pretty much right on with that as I took delivery on October 30th.

He was also trying pushing me into a pre-owned car or one of the 2009's he had sitting on the lot but he backed off quickly when I told him my mind was made up and that I was ordering a 2010. He looked in the computer and actually had a tough time finding one available to order (and remember this was back in June '09 so this shouldn't have been an issue). He called his sales manager over and they finally found a build that was allocated to them which they could change if it was done by the end of that week.

You could say this dealer was putting on a show for me but I can tell you that was definitely not the case because I went to several dealers to comparison shop and all of them told me pretty much the same thing.

I was kind of hoping that the smaller allocation of 2010's will bring me a little better resale value when the time comes but when I think about that more carefully it probably won't help since the 2009 is the exact same car with the lone exception of the steering wheel.