[panopticon]

Yeah, the ETA wasn't incredibly important to me for planning purposes. It was just nice to know that I was getting <exactly this car> in <roughly this timeframe>. As opposed to "keep calling and maybe we'll have a Hyundai Ioniq allocated to us that'll arrive a month or two after, oh an enjoy your $10k 'market rate adjustment' to the MSRP."

Fwiw my car was delivered in the middle half of the original ETA, but I know that others have had lots of issues with their ETAs.

[dangrossman]

You can order a new car, configured as you like, with almost any brand. You'll get an ETA and a tracker that shows when it's going into production, when it's leaving the factory, when it's on a ship/boat/truck to your dealer, and when it's ready for pickup. You can get most dealers to agree in writing not to add any markups if you reserve a car with their dealership as the delivery point. That's how most people are buying EVs of any make right now, not just with Tesla.

[panopticon]

You technically can sometimes, but in my experience it's really difficult to actually do that. Dealerships get limited custom order bank allocations, and if you're not really early when the MY order bank opens your order will potentially slip a model year or even more (at least for in-demand models).

For Hyundai specifically I was looking for the Limited trim, and I've been told they're only allocating custom orders to dealerships with level 3 chargers. And even then the order bank for MY 2022 had already been closed when I started shopping around. I would have had to wait for the MY 2023 bank to open.

[dangrossman]

I've done it twice with VW for ID4s. There's no special time period to order, and you don't need to talk to a dealership first, you can order from the VW website any time. If your car doesn't go into production until after a model year rolls over, then you get that newer model year.