Configurator by next Tuesday?

Considering production trucks will be hitting dealers in December, any guesses when the configurator will go live?

Next Tuesday is 12/12/2023.

 

Your guess is as good as anyones.....

 

yeah, gonna treat this like I treated my mom's pot roast with a promise of her homemade cheesecake for dessert... chew on the flavorless content as well as slip a few onions and carrots in there to add flavor and try to absorb anything I can before I hide it under the table for the cat to drag away as I wait for dessert.

 

Pot roast!

 

I was in the Marine Corps before I had an absolutely mind blowing experience being forced to eat the most DELICIOUS pot roast I had ever had....

 

does it matter. they will build and ship what they want and the distributors will dump extra crap on that you don't want.

 

When they post a price they have to take orders. For some reason they aren't ready to do that.

 

Soon, they won’t have a choice. Should be interesting to see what the regional distributor buyers decided to order. Bend over…

 

I know, right?

 

Since you really can't order a custom truck from Toyota, I am going to say never. The page will just be a bunch of pictures with a price tag below them. You can order one by adding it to the Toyota cart. Your order will be pushed to a local dealer and you will pay a 5k markup for bothering them with an online order.

 

just talked to Ourisman Toyota in Chantilly VA. Sales Manager said they get their allocation at some point tomorrow, it was promised by first thing in the morning. He only got one SR5 in the first "loop" which was mostly just SR and SR5s... and this second loop is supposed to have a few more in the TRD levels... but he said he's not gonna hold his breath til at least the 15th. And he LOVES the SmartPath workflow. So sometime next week I expect most dealerships will have at least one model on the floor.

 

I don’t understand how they even bother with this bullshit feature, there are very few cars that you can “build” however you want and even fewer where popular options aren’t bundled together.

I was going to say that Porsche was the last holdout, but even they are bundling some options together to save money.

 

The configurator is basically an inventory search and lead generation tool. Its main value to me is to be able to see common configurations and MSRP.

If Toyota Marketing added MSRP to the ebrochure, that would be all I need.

 

Toyota was actually the industry "leader" that started bundling options into fewer packages to simplify manufacturing, in the 1980s before the web was invented.

Recall some domestic models (GMs mostly) have a sticker on the glovebox listing a table of RPO codes denoting the options on the particular vehicle. Toyota never did that.

 

maybe I misunderstood how he was describing what I can only visualize as "ring around the rosie" for handing out the first models getting shipped out. His dealership was allocated a single SR5 last week or earlier this week in the FIRST round of ring around the rosie and he seemed to be expecting some TRD models in the next round which happens tomorrow or friday. My brain connected his words "we were allocated an SR5" to my own fantasy of they put that truck on a toy hauler headed east and since you can fit what, 8? vehicles? on one of them, within 8 stops they would be dropping it off in Chantilly.

and those truck drivers want to get us our toys ASAP right? so we stop talking about lawnmowers?

Yeah, I may have gotten ahead of myself there. my bad.

 

This is my one HUGE complaint about Toyota. Its 2023 why cannot I not build a truck on the site. Pay a down payment $5k? Then get a delivery date. 3months? 6months? whatever. Then go pick up truck around said date.

But I know they sell fast enough they dont care. Still driving my 08 as I save up for maybe a 25.

 

The blame lies with car dealers that have lobbied to create laws at the state level that prevents direct to consumer sale by car manufacturers.