Dodge Club Makes Largest Group Buy Ever, 7 Vipers at Once
Palmer Dodge of Georgia salesman explains the many struggles with ordering and delivering Minnesota Viper Owner’s Club’s crazy request.
The video above comes to us from the VINwiki YouTube channel and it features a unique story of a car salesman who helped to orchestrate the largest group buy of the Dodge Viper ever. After being banned form a forum where another dealership representative badmouthed him, Sean O’Grady of Palmer Dodge in Roswell, Georgia received a call from the head of the Minnesota Viper Owner’s Club that would become a part of the car’s long history.
Beginning
The video starts with O’Grady explaining that he was a member of a dealership where his business was not a supporting sponsor, so he was not permitted to promote his business. When someone asked for information on where to buy a Viper, several members referred the OP to O’Grady and Palmer Dodge, at which point the Director of Sales & Marketing for the dealership spoke up to offer his help. At that point, he was banned from the forum and another dealership representative began to badmouth him, without O’Grady having any sort of way to defend himself.
It turns out that a member of the forum had been working on a unique purchase with the dealership where the guy talking trash on the forum worked, but when that dealership was unable to meet the unique request, the forum member called O’Grady. This member’s name (and the names of all of the buyers) are not included in the video, but we know that the man who called Palmer Dodge was the president of the Viper Club of Minnesota and along with six other members, they wanted to make a group buy of Dodge Viper ACR Extremes.
It sounded like a great deal for O’Grady, but there was a catch. The buyers wanted the cars to be ordered at the same time and delivered at the same time, at the factory with sequential VIN numbers. If the dealership couldn’t meet all of those guidelines, there would be no deal, so O’Grady went to work.
Planning
The first step was for O’Grady to call the Viper Concierge line to find out if they could make those demands a reality. Unfortunately, the answer was a stern “no”. It was impossible to keep the orders together in the build process and it was impossible to do a factory delivery with seven cars at once, so the company just couldn’t do it.
That didn’t stop O’Grady from calling the initial point of contact and telling him that they could do it. After that, he spent hours on the phone, manually recording the full orders for each of the seven Dodge Viper ACR Extremes. He then called the Viper Concierge back, told that person that the deal had been made and they had to figure out a way to make it all happen.
The biggest issue was that three of the buyers had ordered custom colors that required some back and forth during the approval process while the other four ordered standard colors. That means that if O’Grady had placed the orders right away, the standard color cars would have been built much sooner, so he worked with the GTC program paint people to get the custom colors fully hammered out before actually placing the order. One buyer ended up changing his color from green to purple when they were unable to match the green paint on his Lamborghini. However, after a year of planning, the official order was placed and the cars began production together with everything ready to go, including the custom paint colors.
Delivery
After more than a year of planning and production time, the seven Dodge Viper ACR Extremes were built and ready to be delivered. Unfortunately, one of the buyers had to back out due to a family emergency, but the dealership accepted that car into their stock.
This meant that the factory delivery would only need to accommodate six cars, and with the delivery areas designed to fit three cars, the team decided to have the six buyers to the plant for a two-tier delivery. When the first trio of buyers were being introduced to their cars, the other three were touring the plant, then the two groups switched and everyone had their Vipers.
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