Tag: BRZ

Subaru Australia has good news for its customers waiting for a BRZ sports coupé. An extra allocation of 140 cars has been secured which should mean a cut in waiting time for those with expected deliveries from May next year onwards.

Nick Senior, Managing Director, Subaru Australia, said: “We’re delighted that Fuji Heavy Industries (FHI) has recognized the enormous demand for BRZ in Australia and allocated additional production.”

If you’re one of the BRZ customers who may be affected by this generally good news expect your local dealer to be in touch soon. And if you’re one of the many people waiting up to 18 months for a Toyota 86, don’t be too despondent. Your time will come. Eventually.

Midday today was the deadline for Subaru’s exclusive online sales of the BRZ sports coupé to commence. Only trouble was, like the real world, the extreme demand for the car throttled supply, or in this case the Subaru website.

For our own purposes we wanted to experiment with the online purchasing arrangement but gave up after about 45 minutes of getting error messages of various kinds. I fired off an email to Subaru Australia spokesman David Rowley for comment and then went to look at the BRZ the old fashioned way, at the local dealer (Capital Subaru, Fyshwick).

Happily for Subaru, I was greeted by a friendly sales assistant only too happy to show me the WR Blue BRZ they had on display. When I mentioned the online dramas the sales assistant confirmed with me that two orders just came through for their dealership.

On return to the office David Rowley had replied, saying: “We experienced a massive spike in the volume of traffic—looks to be working fine at our end now.” That was about 1:15pm eastern time.

A bit later Rowley returned with a quick update informing they had sold 50 BRZs in the first 90 minutes of sales going live. “Went ‘live’ at around 12:45 with first customer starting the process at 12:50 and completed transaction at 1:09,” he confirmed.

Those numbers represent about one quarter of Subaru’s initial allocation.

For the record we’re still finding the website buggy on our Firefox/Mac OS combination and unable to process an order, but as we’re not seriously in the market for a BRZ at this point in time we can let it slide. If you want to try your luck CLICK HERE.

It’s clear that anyone seriously in the market for a Toybaru is going to have to be patient and accept that others will get their car before them and that good things come to those who wait.

Despite the troublesome start we do think this online approach has merit for Subaru’s self-confessed limited supply. The 86–BRZ concept is one we applaud and we wish both Subaru and Toyota well in their efforts to satisfy their customers.

UPDATE: Subaru has confirmed their 2012 BRZ allocation sold out before 4pm this afternoon. You can read their full statement after the break.

Nick Senior, Managing Director, Subaru Australia explains the reasons behind the online only sales approach for the BRZ: “We knew that we wouldn’t have sufficient BRZs to supply our entire network immediately following the launch.

“The online approach allows us to place demonstrator BRZs with selected dealerships, from which customers can arrange test drives via subaru.com.au and also select their preferred delivering dealer.

“Where required, there is an online option to arrange a trade-in valuation and there is also a handy finance calculator.”

The online order book opens at 12 noon (AEST) on Monday 16 July.

This is a novel approach from Subaru and there may be some teething problems from a logistics point of view, especially regarding trade-ins. However, there’s probably also good reason to have national headquarters controlling the ordering during what is sure to be unprecedented demand.

You can read the full statement from Subaru Australia after the break.