Here's what another member and I talked about previously after gathering facts about orders....
From what I can tell, it boils down to dealer allocation, as well as if what you ordered fits in the bundle of trucks they're building at the time. I don't think it's any one particular option that really holds up the order. It seems to follow a bulk pattern.
For example, say Ram is about to make 30 2500 Laramies with the diesel. They're only making 30 for this session of builds, and some of those are dealer stock, some are special order (depending on sequence number) and if you don't make it in that batch, you're waiting for the next round to go.
Not sure if that's 100% but that's the only thing that makes sense so far.
I'd imagine the "hold up" is a lot more in line with this, than some convoluted selection of random items, colors, and packages.
End of the day, RAM is trying to push as many of these things out the door as they can. I've got to imagine that at some point, it's a lot easier to just make the trucks, than to try and come up with some asinine algorithm ruling this or that out.
They obviously cannot complete trucks with parts they don't have, but I bet it works something along the lines of:
- make trucks in order of ordering, in batches that make assembly line sense,
- high value full option and bottom barebone spec trucks take precedence due to cost, requirement of components, and lack of overall options,
- trucks that cannot be made for eventual X missing item gets pushed to next potential batch when item is available, with trucks above possibly before them still,
- odd ball orders, weird colors, etc, get pushed to next relevant batch where it makes sense (ie, finally got X order in neon pink), with trucks above possibly before them still,
- canada, you get it next year.
That said, I truly have no idea how it actually works, and I doubt any forum-backed amount of data will uncover much. You'd need to see their entire production to try and weed through what they may be doing.
