Great Ty, thanks! That's great to hear about the vocal and mostly nice, on the Elio FB posts folks are vocal and mostly typing the first thing they can think of in an emotional state, knowing there's no consequence for stating their feelings as fact. lol
It's refreshing to read your optimism on the quick availability of the vehicle, once production starts. Tell me more of your thoughts, but it seems to me that there are a thousand little details to work out and work through, before a retail center is open from 9am-9pm, you can walk in and order one, and have it delivered in 2 weeks or less. I'm 4.5 hrs from Denver, so the thought of me driving there on a Saturday, ordering the car, and then returning 2 weeks later to pick it up... realistically one would predict we'd be talking about May of 2016 at the earliest before something like that is in place.
Elio is actually saying they'll be able to go from order to delivery in 24 hours. They'll fill regional distribution centers with base models and at those locations is where the options will be added. The GM plant where they are going to assemble the Elio was putting together Chevy S-10s at the rate of one per 54 seconds which is how fast we ran the line. I was an industrial engineer there balancing line stations and working with automatic line balance system and material line balance system. assembling them at that rate makes 500 per day within reason if their parts can keep up. Now, at half speed, they'll make 250 an hour, 1,250 per week, 5,000 per month, etc... Reservations are just over 18,000 right now with roughly 25% at the $1,000 all-in level (we know this by dividing the highest known reservation number by the total number of reservations - we've tested this over the last couple of "number releases" and it remains consistent).
Regardless, even if you wait till the last minute and put in $100, you'll get one within the first year of production... if you went to $1,000 today, and the formula remains fixed (it'll change when Elio goes to production as people will throw in the $900 at the last second to get the $500 added bonus off)... AND Elio caps preorders at 40,000 for some reason, you'd get yours in about 8 weeks after production starts... $100 would get you one in 8 months.
I, obviously, think the Elio will be a big hit when it comes out like the Mazda Miata was and will be hard to come by after production starts... Those Miatas were fetching $30K in Atlanta - well, that's what they were being advertised for even though Mazda would order you one for $13,900. I think that Elio will be hard pressed to keep up with demand for a while and that if you didn't already have one on order, you could be waiting at least a year to get one. At one point, they said they'd cap pre-orders at one year's worth of production. At this point, it's $100 to help Elio establish a "See, this is going to work because we have enough pre-orders to make it worth producing _____ for us" The door handle manufacturer wants to make sure there will be enough sales to make it worth setting up production.
And that is my two cents worth... I need a hobby.