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June 2, 2022 - A Sign from the Mothership

On June 2, a slight bit of excitement. Luke and I both received correspondence in the mail with an official Porsche letterhead. I was so excited that I coordinated with Luke for him to come over and film me as I extracted the email from my community mailbox.
Small But Important Sign
The one-page message within gave us some much-needed comfort - comfort we'd not felt from Porsche Centre London in quite some months:

" ... While you are waiting for more information about the future delivery of your Porsche, we will enroll you in a waiting for delivery program."

and

" ... While processing your order demand and planning the production of your future Porsche, we would like to provide you with some updates. A higher demand for our products and the success of our latest models, combined with global bottlenecks in the supply chain, have resulted in longer delivery times."

and

" ... Please be assured, our number one priority is to delivery your Porsche as soon as we possibly can."


This letter was very heartening. If nothing else, it validated that we were "in the system". That Porsche Centre London had not in fact placed us in a dusty digital corner and forgotten us, unseen by the larger Porsche organization. We felt that if we were receiving such a letter, it would mean that *at some point* we'd have to be given something, and not potentially skipped over forever.
June 10, 2022 - @gtschronicles is born

Finally, after about a month of toil, we finished creating the GTS Chronicles instagram account. We had crawled back through our timeline, our posts, images-to-date, and put together a timeline-based spreadsheet of entries - then laboriously converted those into individual posts, dated with times starting back from the summer of 2020 and moving forward to the present. Often we had to create some sort of representative graphic to represent the point that particular post was trying to get across. It took quite a bit longer than we had expected. We discussed, corrected, tweaked. We finalized our new logo and put it into place. We set up the associated domains, email address (info@gtschronicles.com), certificates, and stood up the associated web page (gtschronicles.com). Since we have a post in the feed referring to Michael at Porsche ED, we run it by him and get his approval. And then, roughly in the middle of June, we officially launched the @gtschronicles instagram account.

On roughly June 10, 2022, the instagram channel @gtschronicles is officially made public, along with the companion site gtschronicles.com.
Continuing to refine
Excited and proud of this new angle on our media initiative, we reached out to all of our previous contactees, sending them invitations to come and tour our new social media channel and web page. We continued to refine and tweak "The Pitch" video, sometimes incorporating elements related to ongoing developments.

Mid-June 2022 - Contact Closed

Although Michael at Porsche Euro Delivery had been fantastic, we unfortunately received some slightly unhappy news from him. Apparently he was unable to continue his work to find us internal Porsche contacts to work with because ... we didn't have allocations yet. And that was a bit of a catch-22 for us, since we were hoping that engaging on the media initiative with Porsche might have the side-effect of getting the allocations to be given, and given together. But, apparently it didn't work that way. This was a useful hint regarding the nature of the "allocation" in the Porsche customer ordering process. It seemed almost that one wasn't really "real" in the system until you got your allocation. Where we were at the moment - a state called "order demand placed" - was a much more ephemeral state. An uncertain state.

In response to this [hopefully temporary] dead-end, I decided to research for other contacts within Porsche that we thought might be receptive to our ideas. I ended up identifying a bunch of linked-in contacts (mainly Porsche marketing directors for various regions: North America, Germany, Europe, etc). I spent some time crafting outreach messages to them on that platform, and fired those off. I didn't really expect responses from cold-contacting like that, but, well ... nothing ventured, nothing gained, eh?

Late-June 2022 - Allocation Analysis

This stalled situation with Michael at Porsche ED caused us to really start thinking about the exact mechanics underlying how allocations get doled out: who has the ultimate power (to decide who receives them)? how are the allocation decisions made? did they vary from dealer to dealer? Did Porsche Canada or Porsche AG have any say at all? Could they leverage a dealer to give out allocations at all, or were they completely arms-length removed in that regard ... We were not getting any real insight from Christina on this sort of stuff (her statements were very vague). We guessed that this messaging was deliberate and a directive from her upper management. Having a vague message would, of course, give the dealership more wiggle room to assign allocations as they saw fit. Perhaps further evidence that our "positions on the lists" wasn't really so cut-and-dried as we thought.

We decided to direct effort to gathering data about the current flow of allocations. We turned back to the online forums. Luke had already issued a callout to members for information on their own orders and the current state of their order, but just to Canadians. We now expanded the callout beyond Canada. We also started to record our data into a spreadsheet that captured order time, allocation time, and delivery time, and the periods between them. Slowly, we started to get a real view of what was going on with 718 orders and allocations around the world (although admittedly biased towards North America). Here's a snapshot of the top few rows of the spreadsheet as of July 2022:

We compile a comprehensive set of data on orders, allocations and deliveries (snapshot of fragment of spreadsheet from July 2022)
Luke's Thoughts
[on news, lack of news, and allocations...]
Any crumb of good news is welcome, as we have pretty much hit the one-year mark since placing our orders, and the two-year point since first thinking about this idea at all. It's all too easy to get down about it, but perspective is everything. If I add the production increase news, to the fact that no-one has received any allocations here in Canada for the past 8+ months, to the official letter we got from Porsche, it puts me in a positive frame of mind that this will all eventually come good.

(to read more of Luke's thoughts from this moment, check out his blog post)


You can see yours truly (yours trulies?) in the above spreadsheet fragment (other peoples' names we redacted out for privacy reasons). A couple of things emerged fairly early in our analysis: first, the spread of time from order to allocation was getting longer, perhaps reflecting the slowdowns attributed to covid, supply chain issues, the war in Ukraine, sinking of the ship, etc. the second point was that we seemed to be on the upper (i.e. the longer) end of the allocation wait spectrum. We wondered, was that indicative of a particular problem with us vis-a-vis our dealership? It wasn't enough of a gap to be truly concerning yet, but we noticed it in any case. And on the topic of slowdowns, we noted a press release from Porsche stating that they planned to increase 718 production by re-opening an idled factory in Osnabruck. That was a good sign. Maybe the order/allocation bottleneck would get cleared up in the months (or in the year) ahead.

Late-June 2022 - Forums Foray

Continuing to expand our outreach, at the end of June we officially introduced The GTS Chronicles initiative to the Porsche online forums, specifically rennlist.com, and 718forum.com. In general, we were trying to show everyone that we were serious; we were committed; psyched; and enthusiastically working to bring followers along on our journey.

By the end of June 2022, we had introduced the concept of The GTS Chronicles to two of the major online Porsche forums.


On rennlist (the most august and original of online Porsche communities), we got crickets (at least initially). On the 718forum, however, responses to our forum posts came relatively quickly. There were a lot of very supportive comments of the usual, casual sort that you would expect. But one response - in fact the initial response - turned out to be very special:

Hello Guys,

First I really like your logo design.

I am from the Detroit area, and a Long time PCA member... still have my air cooled M491 Classic 1986 and and a special 2019 Cayman S... a manual.

I have a few ideas for you... Would like to chat about Factory contacts I know that may be of assistance. What a great idea.

...Dave


Well now ... that was intriguing. And very friendly. We took Dave up on his offer, and we set up a call for the first of July.
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