Re: IML: Imperials on the lot--unusual to order?

[Christopher H <imperial67@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My ?67 Crown was a "lot car," and is curiously equipped with neither a vinyl
roof nor factory pinstripes (meaning they were a ³delete option² on my car,
as the stripes were standard). I do not know why the fine folks at Dimette
Motors in Santa Monica, CA, would have ordered a well-optioned Crown in
low-key Charcoal for inventory and then delete the paint stripes, but it
caught the eye of the gentleman I bought it from in 1989, and it's still
super-elegant today, IMHO.

Joe, a successful accountant at Hughes Aircraft, would buy himself a
brand-new New Yorker every two years. While he waited for the oil change for
his six-month-old New Yorker, he wandered the lot at Dimette and saw this
car. Realizing he¹d always really wanted an Imperial, he stepped up... and
then drove it for 22 years.

Are times different now? Perhaps the ultimate expression of build-to-order
in the modern day is the Maybach. When I worked on its launch marketing, I
was hesitant to offer my dissenting opinions to the Germans' idea that there
would be no cars in dealers, but rather each would be commissioned by its
owner. A Mercedes V12 owner spoke for me in a focus group: ³I¹m not gonna
wait eight weeks. I wanna walk down to Ray Catena [an MB dealer in NJ] and
pick one out.² Like the dealers could have a row of $400,000 cars in stock.
But it's been a big reason Maybach sales have been slow (no reason to go
into the other reasons here... This is not the MML!)...

But in the Imperial days, dealers certainly did configure and order cars to
have in stock without their being pre-sold. Not everyone wanted to wait.
They just wanted a new Imperial. This is even more the norm today (few
people order cars... though if you do so from Mother Mopar, as I did for my
2001 Jeep, they print your name on the window price sticker!), but it was
still relatively common then. Few people would order a car if they couldn¹t
check one out on the lot first. I would guess that few dealers ever ordered
no-option Imperials for inventory.

And for many, ³an Imperial² was exactly what they wanted. They didn¹t even
know what options they were missing from the car in the pretty color they
liked. They just negotiated the deal on the car they found in stock.

Inconceivable to us enthusiasts, perhaps, but not every buyer was like us.

Chris in LA
67 Crown
78 NYB Salon


On 8/11/05 9:39 PM, Crownking at crownking62@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

>> It seems inconceivable to me that anybody would have purchased a prestige
>> care without ordering exactly what they wanted.





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