Going to update since the thread moved back to the top.
Have been running a fully custom wordpress site for two months now, and it's a ton of work to get everything setup. Dealers who think they are internet savy, need to be webmaster savy before trying to enter into a project like this. Or pay someone to do it all for you, but did it all by hand with a some outsourcing for coding. Consider you'll have to write a ton of content for the site, make a bunch of pages, setup forms, inventory, etc it's definitely a time suck. It's an awesome feeling when you sit down and go through every single page of the site optimizing on-page seo, title tags, meta data, etc. and trump all of the cookie cutter sites from competitors.
With that said the results are phenomenal when done right.. Gained an additional extra 45-50 e-mail leads per month and about a 15 phone call boost. Traffic is down 1,000 visits less, but my conversion rate is so high it makes up for it. Reason being as some of my new pages need some backlinks built. As well, have 6 keywords now ranking in the #1 spot for high traffic terms, and finally reaching page one for some of the harder keywords that cost around $3-4 click. Traffic is growing each month, and now I'm looking forward to re-focusing my efforts on off-page seo and ppc.
Also side note: Dealers you can rank a site without inventory pages for content. (I'm still surprised dealers put no value into their inner pages with generic text, these are the pages you need to put your best content on, they don't get deleted like inventory pages do.) Anyways, I'm harvesting data from another site onto mine in an iframe-ish manner and still killing it in the serps. Working out very very well, but I'm also wrapping up this inventory design PSD which ties into my next step of coding a Wordpress inventory plug-in. Will have an almost complete package once that's done.
