I believe the reason they don't just send the key fob to the dealer where you purchased the car is because many people purchased the car from a dealer nowhere near where they live, thus the reason Toyota allows you to select a dealer of your choice to obtain the key. This is especially true for the R4P. I had been searching for the right one at the right price for 11 months on both the East and West coasts but finally my name came up on the list of the dealer 7 miles from my house! Lucky for me it was even the color my wife wanted from the start!
I had to travel
clear across the country, 3,000 miles, to get an R4P equipped the way I wanted - specifically, an SE
without the Weather and Moonroof option. I hate glass roofs on cars. From June 15 to the end of September, average daytime high temps are 100°F to 108°F where I live, and the last thing I want is to have the sun blasting through a glass roof panel and adding more heat to the inside of my car. Why anyone in California would be willing to buy a Tesla at all is beyond me, given that the entire roof on these cars is a glass panel. I wanted a white R4P, but so few R4P SE's get delivered to the US without the glass roof option, that I spent 2-1/2 years just trying to find one within 1,000 miles of central California, in any color. I never did find a single one, in California, Oregon, Washington, Nevadea, or Arizona, and finally settled on this dark blue one, 3,000 miles away, in Baltimore, MD. But it was worth the wait: when I first started looking, in October 2020, the a/c charger in the SE trim was the same 3kW unit used in the Prius Prime; to get the 6 kW charger, you had to buy an XSE with Premium Package, and that added $9800 to the price of an SE, and forced you to accept a glass roof, which I wasn't going to do. For 2023, ALL Rav4 Primes get the 6 kW charger, including the base SE trim.
I also don't like the 19" wheels on the XSE, as their is a much more limited selection of all-terrain tires available in that size compared to the 18" SE wheels.
