SOUTHFIELD, Mich. — Ford used to flood Beau Boeckmann with more cars than he knew what to do with. Now, he’s not getting enough.

Boeckmann, vice president of Galpin Ford in Los Angeles, asked for 100 Fusion sedans in July. He received seven.

“I am begging for inventory across the board,” said Boeckmann, with the automaker’s top-selling dealership. “I couldn’t sleep a year ago because I thought, ‘We have a year’s supply of these cars!’ And now I’m worried about our inventory again because we don’t have enough.”

With Ford, General Motors and Chrysler kicking a decades-long habit of building more cars than customers want, dealers are howling that they can’t get enough models to drive sales back to pre- recession levels. This newfound discipline preserves the automakers’ profit per vehicle and draws praise from investors. At the same time, it cuts retailers’ volumes.

Gordon Stewart, who owns Chevrolet dealerships in Michigan, Georgia and Florida, said GM isn’t producing enough Equinoxes to meet his requests. Sales of the Equinox could be triple or quadruple current levels if he had adequate supplies, he said.

“The requests mean nothing,” Stewart said in a telephone interview. “They appreciate the requests, but it does nothing for what they can produce.”

GM said last week it would increase output of the Equinox. The company is trying to meet demand without building too many vehicles and relying on discounts as it did in the past, said Tom Henderson, a spokesman for Detroit-based GM.

“We’re working awfully hard to provide the additional capacity to meet that demand,” he said. “But we don’t want to go back to the days where we had overcapacity and had to use a lot of incentives.”

Chrysler slashed production by half in 2009, and GM cut 44 percent as the companies went through bankruptcy and extended summer plant shutdowns. Ford, the only major U.S. automaker to avoid bankruptcy, lowered output 16 percent, according to J.D. Power Associates in Troy, Mich.