Very true, though some people out there just have money to burn and want it now. I would imagine they are just trying to land a big fish.

I have been watching a 2022 Discovery at Atlanta Autos. The cars MSRP value is around 77k, they started out 2 months ago at 110k and have been slowly dropping the price. Spoke to them once, and have been taunting them a bit at every price change to sell it to me at MSRP. They've stopped responding to my e-mails lol.

 

People are buying them, and fast. $10-20k markups around here. Anytime a V8 has come, it's been $50k markup and sold instantly. Welcome to 2021!

 

I gave up after finding out that dealerships out of my area are not allowed by JLR to sell me a Defender. I ordered a Bronco at MSRP. Will keep it till Rivian is ready.

 

@panamamk1 what did you do to get blackballed?

 

I think he meant that JLR will not allow their dealers to sell to out of state customers. I was told the same thing when I inquired several dealers. You would have to get your local dealer to arrange an inventory swap. Not bloody likely these days with so little inventory available..

 

That is totally correct about the sales area. If they do, they have to pay some kind of offering to the dealer who should have your business due to zip code (well, you pay actually). I was shopping for mine, before I just decided to go ahead and order it (they always had something I absolutely didn't want or lacked something, or just plain weird colors). Turns out I could get around it, since I have two homes in differing states. So I could choose the one with the lowest sales tax/registration and not worry about the sales region. The dealer pointed it out to me, I didn't just stumble across it. The difference was not trivial in fees. It also turns out the dealer allocation is tied to their previous sales numbers. So a low sales volume dealer will get very few and a higher performing one will get plenty. It turns out that the closest dealer to me, Scottsdale, has a not so huge sales volume (strange considering the size of the place). The dealer next to my home in Laguna, Mission Viejo, sold something like 4 or 5 times more volume. So they had a much larger selection and bigger allocations coming in. Then in some perverse twist in the Universe, turns out tax and license was about $1200 cheaper in CA. I almost had a stroke when I heard that. I think it is the only thing cheaper in CA, well for the moment at least. It turns out to not be as fortunate as I initially thought. Super not pay taxes, what is bad about that! Well the insurance for me to put the vehicle in zip 92651 is about 3 times higher than here in the mountains 86004 with USAA. It was mostly due to higher collision and uninsured motorist. There ain't no justice.

 

There are virtually no new Defenders in Florida. A few months ago a new dealership opened in Orlando and received their initial allocation of 28 Defenders and immediately added $10,000-$12,000 markups to all of them. They are all gone. A dealer in Tampa had one or two and when I inquired about them I was told they can’t sell to me because there is a dealer closer to me. Mind you, the dealer near me hasn’t had a new Defender other than a customer order that fell through, in at least six months. Although we have asked the dealer to order one, apparently they have no idea how many orders they will be allowed to make once LR opens up the order books. Oh, and we asked for the 2.0 turbo so that may not happen at all.

We found a used 2020 with 5000 miles, overpriced like all Defenders are within a 500 mile radius of me, and bought it. Fortunately our trade in was overpriced also ($6,000 more than we paid for our 2020 Wrangler Rubicon with 25,000 miles) so we figured if we want one we might as well get it now.

 

Somewhat similar story here except with a new Defender. My trade-in gained $10-15k in value in a year time, so the extra markup on my new 22 Defender X was essentially nullified. The other option was sitting in the order limbo for who knows how long with very little communication.. AND paying a markup for it on top of that. Yea nah.

 

I’m in Tampa and I called all three dealers today in the area. All said the same thing about the ridic markups. -_- wishing I would have bought one a while back. I’m wondering what will happen in a few years when everyone is mega upside down by paying $20k over asking on all these cars. My bro in law just paid a $25k market adjustment on a Ram TRX @ $125k. I just cannot justify that for a vehicle that will already lose value.

 

Depending on the day (or hour), I imagine my Defender will hold it's money or increase or decrease! So, right now my thought is that every COVID Car is going to take a ding in the resale market. I can't imagine what it will be like if production kicks back in for the resale market of these Defenders (and all vehicles) being built partially to spec. You wouldn't know what the heck you were really getting. Most sales start on-line and you couldn't trust the standard options on anything until you saw it in person. I think (currently) that it will hurt things. Fortunately, I got everything on my Defender to spec, just not MY spec (or what I ordered).