Well, this certainly has been a fiasco. The Jeep was shipped not more than a couple of days after it was built and as of Thursday was still not delivered to the dealer. Status showed it was still tied up in Marquez, TX in a railyard after getting there two weeks ago. That was about 100 miles north of Houston. I contacted the dealer. Contacted Jeep. Contacted some people on the Jeep forums who actually worked at the Jeep plant. No one could find out anything, and no one could apparently DO anything. It still needed to get to the Westfield area right out of Houston where it would be unloaded from the railcar onto a truck and taken to the dealer. Other jeep's status that I have been checking were typically seeing 6 to 8 days delay once theirs got to Westfield. So it didn't look like I was going to get that Jeep anytime soon.
FYI, here's the status display of that Jeep ordered for Houston up to yesterday when I canceled the order:
Rich Z (Wrangler Sahara - White)
Date ordered: 07/30/2015
Current Status: KZ
D1 status date: 08/14/2015
Estimated delivery: 10/03/2015 - 10/09/2015
Built pending inspection: 09/04/15 03:03:40 PM
Production Status KZ Received 09/04/15 03:35:40 PM
Railcar Departure / Yard Exit 09/09/15 09:46:53 AM TOLEDO RAIL, OH
Rail Interconnect Carrier 09/10/15 12:32:00 AM MILAN, MI
In-Transit Report Station, Rail Arrival 09/11/15 06:55:00 AM PERU, IN
Rail Interconnect Carrier 09/12/15 09:46:00 AM SALEM, IL
In-Transit Report Station, Rail Arrival 09/13/15 09:56:00 AM ROE, AR
In-Transit 09/16/15 02:44:00 PM ROE, AR
In-Transit 09/16/15 11:44:00 PM STAMPS, AR
In-Transit 09/17/15 10:12:00 AM CORSICANA, TX
In-Transit Report Station, Rail Arrival 09/17/15 08:10:00 PM MARQUEZ, TX
For some background, I ordered the Jeep from a dealer in Houston for two reasons. (1) he was offering the best price I could find, and (2) Connie and I decided that what we were going to do was to rent a car, drive out to Houston to pick up the Jeep, and then continue on for a long talked about trip out west for a few weeks to do some exploring in the mountains and desert areas. Had been planning on this taking place around mid September when the Jeep I ordered SHOULD have been at the dealership ready to be picked up. So here we are now into the first part of October, and no end in sight. I really didn't want to be out there in November, plus Connie made a doctor's appointment on 10/20 thinking we would be back long before then. So many things we wanted to do were being backed up with us thinking "we'll do that after we get back from Texas..."
So a week ago I went back to square one and started looking again to see what was on the dealer's lots. I found only two that were feasible for a PLAN B, and both were up in Warner Robins, Georgia. Both 2015s. One of the two was on the lot, but had the optional leather interior and a few other options I really wasn't crazy about. The seats and the interior were what they are calling "saddle" which is kind of a tan brown color. In some pics it actually looked more orange than brown. Didn't really look good, and I really didn't want leather for that Jeep. Especially when we would be paying a good chunk of change for that optional leather when we are going to pulling that back seat out anyway and leaving it out. The remaining Jeep was still in transit to the dealer, so I thought, "sheesh, here we go again with the shipping stuff." But it was much closer on the options. There were three that I didn't order on my original Jeep, but I figured I could live with them. This one also had the saddle/black interior, but the seats were standard cloth and colored black, with only the lower interior panels inside being that saddle color. This didn't look as bad.
Well, by last Thursday, I had had enough. I contacted the dealer in Warner Robins and that "in transit" Jeep had just hit the lot. He offered me a pretty decent price (about 3+ percent under invoice). In the meantime I contacted the dealer in Houston and told him that today was do or die day. I has asked for some sort of compensation for the headache the delay was causing me, or at the very least a FIRM date when that jeep would be arriving. Did not hear back from him. Nothing had changed in the status display I was looking at. So Thursday evening I told the Warner Robins guy (Josh) that he had a deal.
Friday morning Connie and I got up early, went to the bank to get a cashier's check, then drove on up to Warner Robins.
This is what we came back home with:
BTW, I didn't actually cancel the order with the original Jeep until we had the new Jeep in our possession. I've got far too many scars on me from Murphy's Law to have blind faith that everything was going to be just ducky with that Jeep up in Warner Robins. I cancelled that original order after we got back home with the new Jeep.
It rained nearly the entire time coming home from Georgia, so the reason the concrete is wet around the Jeep is because I had to hose off the mud on the tires and lower part of the Jeep that we got driving home on our own road. Connie was following in her truck, as she wanted me to do the honors of driving the new vehicle. But at least I know the Jeep doesn't leak, and the windshield wipers certainly work well.
Anyway, as for this one being a 2015 instead of a 2016, I don't think that really makes much difference. For one thing, Jeep started building the 2016s on 09/01/2015. The build date on the tag for the 2015 we got says it was built in 09/2015. It was delivered from the factory to the dealer on 09/30, and had 12 miles on the odometer when we got to the dealer and looked at it. So it's quite possible that this might have been the LAST 2015 built.
As for the optionals, I'm rather glad to not be getting the optional 7 spoke wheels I originally ordered. I'm probably going to want to put wider tires on it eventually, and quite likely I will need to buy wider tires to do that. And the wider tires would mean I would need a better offset to the wheels or else use wheel spacers to keep the stock wheels. So I would have felt dumb about throwing away the $600 I paid for the optional wheels, which are the same size and offset of the stock wheels. The other optionals that I didn't order for the original Jeep were the radio/navigation system, automatic temp control for the AC, and a connectivity group. Honestly, I can live with all three, and push come to shove, probably things I should have ordered anyway. As Connie said, she thinks this one is actually better than what I had originally ordered. She likes the interior, and says that the stock wheels and tires actually look a LOT better in person than they did in pictures.
So maybe this all worked out for the best. Well, except for not taking the trip out west. But I guess that can be some other time. And thankfully, today was the first day in weeks that I didn't have to take an excedrin for the darn headache this gave me every day.
