Ultimately it's GM's ordering process that is causing this mess; why in the world would they have it set up where customers can place orders that may not be accepted for months?
Ram's ordering system wouldn’t allow the dealer to place an order that has a constrained item.
The majority of times this happens is because the ordering manager never actually submits your order, because they know something something the customer ordered is on constraint. They’re not going to waste an allocation on something GM won’t accept. The ordering manager really should be the only
person who you talk to when you go to buy a car. But that’s not how the dealership model is set up for the most part. You may build an entire car with your salesman, he has no idea what on constraint and at the end of the week the ordering manager is entering everything into their system and he gets to your order, enters everything, notices what on constraint and he just doesn’t do anything else.
And I agree with you that dealers aren’t helping most customers themselves either. They don’t always provide key info, like what’s on constraint, that may cause a delay for months. If that’s what is holding you up from being in their next allocation when it’s your turn, they should tell you ASAP to make that decision - do you want to drop it or do you want to leave it.
But it’s also not always in their control since it changes week to week. So unless your order is being submitted ASAP because they have an immediate allocation, they have no way of knowing what may be on constraint by the time you’re in their next allocation.
It’s a complete mess. But it works both ways because when you get a bunch of customers placing simultaneous orders, it’s not shocking that dealers are going to tell customers your car isn’t guaranteed to be yours unless you buy it immediately.