dealers ordered cars from the factory and what was the response? (Instead of obtaining a car built last year from existing inventory) In other words, are embedded systems issues causing production problems or are these only minor impacts that are easily fixed? Can anyone working in the car factories comment on this? How about major parts suppliers? Parts shortages caused by problems with one supplier could shut down production. Is this happening? There seems to be almost a news blackout on this entire subject.

-- Moe (Moe@3stooges.gom), January 18, 2000

Answers

woowoo,

It could have been part of their contingency planning effort -- indeed, something I might have considered doing if I was in their shoes. Even if you were absolutely convinced that you had no Y2K problems in your own manufacturing facility, how could you be sure of avoiding problems with transportation and all the other vendors in that part of the supply chain? Why not avoid the risk completely by getting the inventory out on the dealer's lots ahead of time?

In a way, it's not much different than the strategy used by many of the government agencies that sent their early-Januar checks out in late December ... just to avoid the risk of running into problems

Ed

-- Ed Yourdon (ed@yourdon.com), January 18, 2000.

I live in Detroit. You couldn't keep a downed assembly line quiet in this town. NO WAY. Trust me, they're working, or it'd quite literally "be the talk of the town" around here ...

-- Phil Erup (assemblylines@humming.com), January 18, 2000.

I do know that Ford shipped its entire Q1 2000 production to dealers in Dec 1999. I wonder why?

-- woowoo (missing@you.woo), January 18, 2000.

"the GM Saturn plant was having problems"

And thus does hyperbole become history. As I remember it, they shut down production until the 18th of January (yesterday) because of overproduction of finished cars, not undersupply of parts.

The question is: did they come back on line yesterday as planned?

-- Servant (public_service@yahoo.com), January 19, 2000.