Dealers order what the other 99% will buy....

Having spent a good portion of my life working in the car business I learned a few things. One is the dealers want to please the masses. They order cars that have the most appeal to the most people. For example a lot of people won't buy black cars. Their hard to keep looking clean and their hotter in the summer than other colors. I personally would love to have a black Hellcat Challenger with the widebody option and monster tires. But that's me. There's people who won't buy red cars. The same goes for options. The Kelley Blue Book actually deducts value if a car has a manual transmission. Now you may want a 5-speed in your Mustang or a 6-speed in your 'Vette, but since 95% of the general public want automatics-a stick is a detriment in the value guide. Anyhow-why do you think so many cars in the '60's and '70's had vinyl tops? To pad the stickers with high-profit options!!  In my opinion nothing looks good with a vinyl top. On some cars-particularly '70's Camaros and Firebirds a vinyl top really screws up an otherwise great-looking car. But dealers ordered them in droves, because it made money and most people would tolerate them. It was a rare person who walked off the lot or demanded that they dealer trade or special order another car WITHOUT the damned vinyl top. So somehow-a vinyl top became a "popular" option. Remember the phony wood trim on the sides of Ford wagons?  That was the ugliest crap ever put on a car-but it was rare to see a wagon without it!!  GM and Chrysler had that crap too but Ford was the worst offender. They only ordered for stock and promoted the high-end, high profit models. Everyone did. For example in the late '70's you could get a Rally Sport Camaro with a 350 and a 4-speed. You could get a base-model Camaro with a 350 and a 4-speed. Did you ever see one on a dealer's lot?  Hell no!!  You want a hot rod Camaro, you are damn well stepping up and buying a loaded Z / 28!!  That's the mentality the dealers had. Same for Pontiac. You could get a 400 or a 455 in a Formula Firebird through most of the '70's. How many 455HO Formulas have you seen? Or 400 Formulas? Or 350 / 4-speed models?  Yes Pontiac made a "Formula 350" with the scooped hood and the trim of it's bigger brothers, but you rarely see one. That's because the dealers wanted you to buy a Trans-Am. In the late '70's GMC Trucks had a cool option called the "Street Coupe". Never heard of it? I'm not surprised. Anyhow it was an option on 1/2 ton 2WD pickups. You got multi-colored tape stripes down the sides,Bucket seats in the interior,special "Street Coupe" badging and 15X8 Rally Wheels shod with fat, LR60-15 white-letter tires. Engine choices were anything from a 2bbl 305 to a 454. A friend of mine had a 454 stepside with a TH400 and a 3.73:1 posi, and he showed his tailgate to many shocked Camaro, Firebird and Mustang owners!! It was on the option list from '77-81, but you almost never see one. GMC also had an option for the Caballero ( GMC's version of the El Camino, somewhere around '77 the name was changed from "Sprint" to "Caballero" ). That was called "Diablo" and had a big devil decal on the hood much like the T/A's screaming chicken, special striping, and body-colored slotted Rally Wheels. One of the buff magazines tested one with a 350 and a 4-speed. In the downsized for '78 intermediates that combo really moved, ( Yes you could order that combo in 1978 but not many dealers did ) and they raved about the burnouts it could do. Outside of that magazine test and a salesman I knew in Springfield, Missouri that had one, I have never seen another one. I didn't know the Li'l Red Express option existed on Dodge Pickups until I read about one in Car and Driver and then went to my local dealer to see one. They also had a cool "Macho" package for 4x4's. Since the largest engine you could get in Ford F150 was a 2bbl 351M / 400M and GM offered an anemic 400 small-block Chevy that wheezed out 170 hp in a K10-that 440 powered D150 was a very "Macho" ride indeed!  But they weren't promoted. Same thing with the Ford Lightning, GMC Cyclone and Dodge Dakota R / T pickups in the '90's. What were the bean counters thinking? "Okay, lets build 3,000 or so obscenely fast but totally useless trucks that will appeal to gearheads, but don't promote them in the magazines or in sales brochures."  "People might want to buy them". Huh?  If I hadn't worked in dealers, I never would have known that Buick Grand Nationals existed, or that in 1989 you could get a Trans-Am with the GN motor!!  They weren't promoted in factory literature or the buff magazines. Ditto for 2003-2004. The Mercury Marauder was a cool car based on the Crown Victoria Police car platform. But it went beyond the "Police Interceptor" package. These had wrist-thick front and rear sway bars, fat, ZR-rated tires on 18" wheels, a special interior with Auto Meter guages, a 4-speed automatic with a high-stall converter and the snarling 302 hp V8 out of the Mustang Cobra. They wren't promoted in the brochures, and I can't find a single magazine road test of one. They have a "cult" following now, and Ford bean counters are wondering to this day why they didn't sell when GM sold every Impala SS they could make. Because for once-GM did some promotion. "Hey guys-we took a Caprice Cop car, stuffed a Corvette engine in it, beefed up the suspension and the brakes, put some fat tires and chrome wheels on it and gave it a badass monochromatic paint job." "What do you think?" "You love it?" "Great!!" "We'll sell the shit out of them until we stupidly stop making rear-drive Caprices". Check the option lists carefully-If you want a "Bullitt" Mustang or a Hellcat Challenger by all means buy it. However-the Challenger R / T Scat pack or T/A options are pretty cool, and so is the base model Mustang. You don't always have to buy the big dog that the greedy dealers are pushing. Mastermind