Plus it's a huge computational problem, there's huge worth in having the car the customer wants configured just right for her, the day she walks into the dealership. It's an easier sell that much is true, but it's a better sell for her because she gets everything she wanted when she wanted it, which is worth more to her in money. End up splitting the difference. Otherwise it's like, order it (I think there's a paper options menu you tick boxes off of) and wait, wait two weeks, and maybe it won't even arrive in two weeks because of delays (more common now in the twenties) so it's a huge CPU-intensive task. Then also they rent a lot of GPUs to get real-time pixel-something...like rendering a car with all the options the tire-kicker wants so he can see the whole car when buying online. That's cool, that's tech, that's computationally difficult.
You wish. The situation is slowly improving but I had to wait 6 weeks for a car earlier this summer that was "in transit" (which I guess was to say it existed in the manufacturer's database someplace). This wasn't even a build to order vehicle. I suspect that would have been months.
I'm not sure where computational power enters into it. It's just that dealers want to mostly have cars on their lot which are acceptable to the greatest number of buyers who want/need a car right now which the model in hot pink isn't going to be for a lot of people.
Yeah I've never been to a dealership, let alone during covid. Yeah the wait times I have heard are super super long. Two weeks is like the best case these days. So mostly it's about uh...not getting a chargeback frankly. Something. Keeping you waiting.
An allegory.[1]
................
A random finds a fifty-dollar bill on the streets, exclaims, "Oh I'll go to a restaurant!" She gets there and is like "OK that chicken á la" squints "no not the French...the Adobe uh..."
then waiter says "Adobado. That'll be $23.99."
"Up front? Wait wai--"
"Need the money to go buy the ingredients in the first place!"
.................
Yeah so they gotta mask that.
[1] Not claiming I'm any special anything, sticking to the true story I'm a slave of GOD, but that's irrelevant, anybody can say allegories. Maybe the parables are the ones that are for prophets only...maybe I'm thinking of that. Oh well. Best I can do. Used every other literary device by this point, in my attempt of elevating hn posts to an art form.
