So....who managed to order a Type S?

[lumper]

I went on around 130 pm EST today and was able to reserve one, but I chose not too.
they didn't offer a color I want and honestly Iam not ready to buy yet.
I'm curious about others though, so who reserved an Integra today??

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[Integra23]

You know it

 

[Airbag]

The pre-order was a hot mess. The Acura provided link took me to the Integra page but there was no information about the Type-S pre-order. After refreshing for about 5 minutes I started searching and found the correct link under Vehicles - Type-S - Integra and found the link to pre-order. Was able to start the pre-order and ordered the Apex Blue Pearl/Orchid. I chose my dealer and then the paged failed with an error message. I refreshed continuously for about 20 minutes and got nothing. Then started over and got one page deeper to enter my information. The paged failed again and again I refreshed continuously for 20 minutes and got nowhere. Started over and after multiple refreshes each page and finally got to credit card info. Entered my CC info and boom I got a Congratulations page and conformation email. So I got one! Total time was about an hour of frustration. Hope the car is better than the website!

Anyone in the market for my 2004/Acura TL/6MT/Satin Silver Metallic/Ebony/A-SPEC ?

 

[m.c.ricks.ITS]

 

[optronix]

I just posted in the other mess of a thread that served as a live stream for people banging their heads against the wall...

This could only have ended one way. 200 happy people (who were probably bursting blood vessels themselves until they got confirmation they got one), and hundreds/thousands of pissed off people. I don't work in marketing but this was a head scratcher on why they chose to do things this way...

And my theory for why people have such a hard time with these "online reservation" things is security. Each transaction has to be 100% secure, that's going to take supreme priority over user experience. That's why no matter how much you can beef up your infrastructure to handle the extra stress of heightened web traffic, the transactions have multiple steps and each one must be secure. I'm not a web developer but my guess it would be impossible to structure things in a way that every possible error would be handled gracefully, and you run into lots of "issues" on the user side. But 200 transactions completing successfully is all they care about, they don't care about your feelings. You'll still buy the car eventually, or someone else will. I am 100% convinced they'll sell every one they make.

Congrats to those who got theirs, I'm excited to start seeing user/journalist reviews soon. And meanwhile I'll be getting comfortable to get one when it makes sense and not buy into this cycle of insanity.

 

[RUNN1N]

I went on around 130 pm EST today and was able to reserve one, but I chose not too.
they didn't offer a color I want and honestly Iam not ready to buy yet.
I'm curious about others though, so who reserved an Integra today??

I got confirmation on one, but it was a huge hassle of trying over and over again for almost 90 minutes--some were definitely still available at 1:30 EST (probably not LCM/Red) and the whole thing looked deceptively straightforward/capable, but getting from selecting your trim to putting in your personal information/payment was TERRIBLE.

And my theory for why people have such a hard time with these "online reservation" things is security. Each transaction has to be 100% secure, that's going to take supreme priority over user experience. That's why no matter how much you can beef up your infrastructure to handle the extra stress of heightened web traffic, the transactions have multiple steps and each one must be secure. I'm not a web developer but my guess it would be impossible to structure things in a way that every possible error would be handled gracefully, and you run into lots of "issues" on the user side. But 200 transactions completing successfully is all they care about, they don't care about your feelings. You'll still buy the car eventually, or someone else will. I am 100% convinced they'll sell every one they make.

So I had another wonder about why yesterday's system ran the way it did--obviously, there were technical issues (Acura posted a couple banners saying so), but I'm also curious if there might have been some kind of purposeful delay system in place... ok, hear me out.

Perhaps, and I don't know this to be true, something within the system was designed to help facilitate equitable distribution of vehicles across dealerships by size, state, or region? If this were the case, it'd certainly make for a system that seemed very glitchy and slow, but it'd also help Acura safeguard against dealerships facilitating mass reservations to their store (I'm sure Acura has penalties in place for this kind of thing already, it'd undoubtedly lose them future allocations) or one dealership (like a MSRP store in a high-markup area) from getting more reservations than their competitors. I do wonder if the system would only allow certain dealerships to get X reservations, or if there was a delay period of X minutes between each reservation for a given store/state/region.

I don't work in IT either, but it just seems more plausible than a system that was intended to look laggy and overburdened to drive perceived demand/scarcity, which others have posited elsewhere. Not saying the latter isn't possible, I'll admit that I love conspiracy theories as much as the next guy.

 

[Grelco]

I was refreshing quite a bit earlier than the 1pm target time, and I noticed that the link on the main page changed to reserve at 12:55. I went through the process and had no issues at all, and was done by 12:56. It churned for about 20-30 seconds on the final payment submission, but no errors.

So I suspect that shortly after this point it just got bogged down, but I do like the idea of them monitoring allocations to try to spread them out. To feed into your theory, I live close to the Marysville plant - maybe they were happy to give me one and save on shipping costs

 

[RUNN1N]

I was refreshing quite a bit earlier than the 1pm target time, and I noticed that the link on the main page changed to reserve at 12:55. I went through the process and had no issues at all, and was done by 12:56. It churned for about 20-30 seconds on the final payment submission, but no errors.

So I suspect that shortly after this point it just got bogged down, but I do like the idea of them monitoring allocations to try to spread them out. To feed into your theory, I live close to the Marysville plant - maybe they were happy to give me one and save on shipping costs

So that's interesting, because I was attempting to purchase before 1PM EST as well, and I know you and I were both trying to reserve with Acura Columbus... it might've been a matter of a few seconds between the system being capable and overloaded... it's possible... but likely? It was at least 40 minutes before I could get to inputting my personal info, 80 minutes until I got fully through the process. That was 4 devices, trying to get reservations at 2 Ohio dealerships.

I think I can debunk the shipping cost theory though--everything from Marysville goes to Illinois for distribution, so we would've been better off buying out of Chicago or Indianapolis. But I'll admit, I gladly would've done it to save on destination!

 

[evanescent03]

Add a Poll!

"tried but failed"
"success, color A"
"success, color B"....

 

[ckone2030]

Hi All, new poster here. I was able to reserve the black/black yesterday. Spent 40 minutes with 5 website tabs and an iphone, continuing to refresh. But fortunately I was successful. Looking forward to contributing to this forum!

 

[optronix]

I don't work in IT either, but it just seems more plausible than a system that was intended to look laggy and overburdened to drive perceived demand/scarcity, which others have posited elsewhere. Not saying the latter isn't possible, I'll admit that I love conspiracy theories as much as the next guy.

I don't think it's a conspiracy theory, I think you've locked into part of the problem, and why these types of releases can never go completely smoothly. There is a LOT to take into account on the back end, and it all has to be planned for pre-emptively. Not an easy thing to do under any circumstances, but if you throw an excess load and error handling on top of it, things go sideways fast.

It really doesn't take an IT pro to wrap your head around this... but at the same time it takes dozens if not hundreds to implement (ineffectively).

Like I said, this is my shocked face hearing how things went yesterday:

 

[lumper]

You know it

Congratulations!! Thats AWESOME!!

 

[lumper]

The pre-order was a hot mess. The Acura provided link took me to the Integra page but there was no information about the Type-S pre-order. After refreshing for about 5 minutes I started searching and found the correct link under Vehicles - Type-S - Integra and found the link to pre-order. Was able to start the pre-order and ordered the Apex Blue Pearl/Orchid. I chose my dealer and then the paged failed with an error message. I refreshed continuously for about 20 minutes and got nothing. Then started over and got one page deeper to enter my information. The paged failed again and again I refreshed continuously for 20 minutes and got nowhere. Started over and after multiple refreshes each page and finally got to credit card info. Entered my CC info and boom I got a Congratulations page and conformation email. So I got one! Total time was about an hour of frustration. Hope the car is better than the website!

Anyone in the market for my 2004/Acura TL/6MT/Satin Silver Metallic/Ebony/A-SPEC ?

Thats great!! Congratulations!!

 

[Grelco]

So that's interesting, because I was attempting to purchase before 1PM EST as well, and I know you and I were both trying to reserve with Acura Columbus... it might've been a matter of a few seconds between the system being capable and overloaded... it's possible... but likely? It was at least 40 minutes before I could get to inputting my personal info, 80 minutes until I got fully through the process. That was 4 devices, trying to get reservations at 2 Ohio dealerships.

I think I can debunk the shipping cost theory though--everything from Marysville goes to Illinois for distribution, so we would've been better off buying out of Chicago or Indianapolis. But I'll admit, I gladly would've done it to save on destination!

It would be great if they allowed factory pickup to avoid the destination charge. Too bad about shipping to Illinois, didn't know that.

 

[bpebler]

Question: On the portion that says who to contact if you have questions, is that just your dealer's contact info? Reason I ask is because Acura received my payment and sent it to my dealer that I had an additional deposit with, but I still have never received confirmation and the dealer still hasn't gotten confirmation from their Acura rep on who received the reservations per their allocated amount - so I'm sitting here in limbo waiting to hear if I got it even though they got my money. If on your screenshot it is just the dealers info, then that's fine. I am in contact with them frequently. I also sent Acura an email with no response. (Neat.)

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