Apologies for length, but I feel like more detail is better. I found this forum very helpful when it came to understanding the ordering process, the delivery experiences of members and any tips or updates that helped make me feel like I wasn't on an island and there were others going through the same frustrations with no more knowledge than I had.
I ordered a Denali from a local dealer here in Dallas at the end of May 2022. This dealer is very well known in the area and has a reputation for not messing customers around or making the purchase process any more painful than it already is. Pricing is always transparent and during the pandemic they did not charge anything over MSRP and required no deposits to place an order. Those two items, as it turns out, are both hugely positive and also a negative. You were able to order what you wanted, and knew what the price would be and that it would be MSRP. The problem was that the lack of deposits and favorable pricing led to them having a wait list longer than was really manageable.
The Denali I ordered did not have many options (in hopes of keeping the price down and the chances of ordering a constrained item lower.) Sunroof and Max Tow were all I added. Originally I was told 4-6 months. Max Tow, as it turns out, was a constrained item that really saw not a lot of fulfillment, even when it was shortly lifted. The Denali was not the ultimate car I wanted. My preferred vehicle was the AT4, but with the 6.2L. Through several discussions with the dealer I learned that this was a unicorn and despite being "offered" by GM, they really weren't expected to be available anytime soon and that the Denali was my best option for getting something with the 6.2L in the next 12 months.
I had a good amount of back and forth with the dealer, and the estimated delivery time just kept moving back without anything that really provided any more clarity. It was just a case of too many people ahead of me on the list and me having a constrained item. So the 4-6 months became 6-8 and then 9-12 and then most recently it was looking like something in the 12-15 month range, and honestly, even that felt soft. For context I would check with a good friend of mine who had an order in for a Denali that was much more loaded than mine. He put his order in 3 months earlier than mine, and his timing had slipped multiple times (and he's currently still waiting and being told it is now looking like late summer, which would put him at 18 months).
As a means of checking the overall supply (and as suggested by more than one person on this forum) I would use the GMC inventory search feature. Last Tuesday I did my weekly search and the results showed about 5 AT4s with the 6.2L. I reached out to each of the dealers, fully expecting these to all be pre-sold, and in most cases they were. The ones that were not were asking for market adjustments of anywhere from $2k up to $5K. Finally, I found one located at a dealer about 70 miles away that was not pre-sold and there was no market adjustment. Just MSRP. I was stunned to be honest.
So after some very quick back and forth, providing some documents to show I was serious, and agreeing to finance with GM Financial through them, my name was on the vehicle. Two days later, I bought it. In the end, I spent about the same amount of money on the AT4 as the Denali would have cost me, but I got some options on the AT4 I had not wanted on the Denali (power running boards, RSE). I was not going to pass on this vehicle over those options, so I just kept moving ahead.
Before I pulled the trigger I reached out to my dealer one last time to see if things had improved. My logic was that if my ordered Denali was going to make it to me in the next 4-6 weeks, I would just stick with that order. But the dealer told me that they still had no idea when my order would be picked up because of the number of people ahead of me still on the list and the max tow constraint and the number of allocations just not eating up as much of their wait list as they expected. I also checked with my friend with the older Denali order and that's when he told me about the late summer updated timeline. Those two data points were all I needed to feel good about moving forward with the AT4 and canceling the Denali order.
1 week, 600 miles and one spring break road trip to Austin later and I'm really glad I did not hold out for the Denali.
So for me it was just dumb luck that I checked the inventory site on a day that a lot of vehicles were posted by GM (but weren't at dealers yet). Several of the dealers I spoke with actually had available yukons as a result of shipments they just received. Of these dealers, I would say about half were looking for some kind of market adjustment for these unspoken for yukons. One dealer I was working with agreed to take the market adjustment down from $5K to 1.5K. I passed, but felt like that wouldn't have been possible 6 months ago. Also, the dealer I purchased the AT4 from said that they have been selling less cars in the past 2 months than at any point during the pandemic because of the impact of rising interest rates. So maybe the tides are turning in that regard and supply will increase and this thread will be populated less and less with people talking about their most recent slippage in timeline and more posts like mine, with someone stumbling into an available yukon that meets their needs.
Again, apologies for the length, but hopefully someone finds this helpful
