I have always been baffled by the psychology of paying a company a tidy of sum of money to assure that I get one of the first new-and-improved widgets it proposes to make: the pre-production deposit or, as it's popularly known, a "position." This is quite common in the aircraft business as most recently demonstrated by Icon. But others have done it, too, including Cirrus and Cessna.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/ownership/the-lure-of-the-pre-production-deposit