Don't know what other car companies do, probably no better than Ford does.

Thing is that with online shopping for cars growing as much as it is they all need to do better.

This link, http://www.dealerconnection.com/ has a dealer search by state and by city with a 30 mile radius so you can see all the dealers and then individually search their inventories so it's a little better.

I wish they would make available the same car search that the dealers and customer service has so you can enter the car info and see all that are on the dealer lots nationwide.

I would think that something like that would help sell more cars.

 

That link is what I use to look for specific cars at local dealers. You can change that search radius to dealers up to 300 miles away, but I usually stick to Ford dealers within 100 miles of my location. In my case that is 25 dealers, and I can search through all of the Mustangs in their inventories in under 1/2 an hour or so.

edit: I just did some more digging, and it looks like that site limits the search to the closest 25 dealers, even if there are more in a wider radius. In my case the farthest dealer it brings up is 56 miles away, which is #25 in the search. Results will vary, of course, based on population/dealership density.

 

Yeah, but you still have to go into each dealers inventory individually and search for the car you want. Then if you don't find one thenn you have to back out and start all over at the next dealer location, a real PITA.

On cars.com you select a car, a price range and a search distance range and it shows all the cars in that area. Ford should have just such a search capability on their site.

 

My dealership printed me out the list of all of the cars equipped the way I like and helped me obtain the vehicle. It was great to have the list so I could look over the window stickers of the ones I liked and pick out the car I was looking for. I'm guessing that most dealers would probably not go to all of the bother though...