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Unknown Delivery Factors Effecting All Of Us Earlier C8 Recipients:
So you got smart and lucky, and you dodged constraints, went to a dealer that go you a first month allocation, and that dealer selected your order to match with it for that first consensus, and further that your color choice and option choices were not constrained. Let’s call you Customer “A.” And in this hypothetical but realistic recounting of what could well happen again for the C8, Customer A had many, many friends who too were very lucky and got their orders made in the first few week or two of production.
Meanwhile I (“customer B”) who had my deposit down with a top dealer for over 4 years, chose to get mine in Long Beach Red (or Elkhart Lake Blue) , and so the earliest consensus that my order could go was a initial consensus starting in October. So I, Customer B, who also had many, many friends, thought we were not getting our cars as early as Customer A and his/her many friends.
SURPRISE, for fast forward to the first deliveries roughly around February 1, 2020 could be mostly Customer B and his/her friends.
How could that happen?
Several things, some of which can work for you and some of which will definitely work against you.
1. Unknowns of so many kinds/types:
*GM rejecting all of a suppliers’ submitted specific part: This has happened in the past, for example effecting the delivery schedule of the 2006 Z06’s when GM rejected 100% of the first batch of polished wheels for “intermittent cloudiness.” This resulted in my own Z06 which normally would not have been made until month two of the production process, becoming the the very first C6 Z06 NCM Museum Delivery. What at the last minute, the supplier to critical Mag Ride parts can not meet the BGA quality standards, and GM substitutes other parts, or moves up other carryover colors?
*Supplier issues: Such as a Plant malfunction due to a fire (which has happened before during the C7 generation) that plant making just the part you need for your car, but when the plant resumed production two weeks later and got caught up on those parts quickly, might choosing your second or third choice color just to get into the first month’s of allocation been a smart decision?
* GM finding some issues with quality control and due to the amount of vehicles needed that issue fixed before shipping, those cars actually arrived in customer hands later (even though they were the first C7’s made. This is exactly what happened to the earliest of C7’s made. In fact, most of the earliest ones were shipped to an offsite location for repair — which resulted in more than a few later produced C7’s getting into customers’ hand earlier than the first ones.
*BGA’s traditional two week Christmas/New Year’s vacation: What if your car was scheduled to be completed the day before the vacation were to start, but initial C8 production was slowed down from theoretical just 2%, resulting in your car and others not being completed before the vacation started, and instead your C8 and others being sentenced to a two week hibernation in the middle of the Trim # 1 line. And guess whose cars might be less than a couple of hours, maybe even less the 100’ feet behind yours, the first of the next batch of painted ones.
*Your C8 was selected for a supplemental Quality Control (QC) audit (something highly desirable IMO). While this usually means a delay of two days, some have during that audit review been found to have an issue that takes a moderate amount of time to fix.
2. BGA Quality Control Hold (QCH):
Whenever a new generation starts, in order to insure that there are no quality issues found within the first month, GM batch holds those initial cars on BGA grounds. While none of us nor GM yet knows the length of the C8’s initial QCH, most speculate it would be a month long. Could be longer. Could be less.
What happens to those cars? After they are assembled, they are placed parked outside for the remaining of the QC hold. For the C7, around 1,500 of the first produced ones were placed into the hold area. Might your early produced C8 be “trapped” by other, later-produced cars around yours — just as many earlier C7’s were.
3. Transport process:
Please ask yourself, that once the hold is over, are there enough transport trucks to take them out the gate the same day? Not even close, so what if your car was made day one and it was parked, then as the next few weeks went buy, more and more C7’s were parked completely around yours. Look at the closest yellow C7 in the above picture, then the second one behind it. What if your C7, made during week one, was one so far back in this picture, that you can not even see it (BTW what happened to mine).
GM batch ships 11 C8’s per Jack Cooper Transport. They are not going to send a transporter with only eight of them. Let us imagine you live rural, Texas (or anywhere other than in a highly populated area). GM has six C8’s rearing to go to your home county, but no others, but where you live is not on the path to another location where they could unload some here, some there, along the way. So those eight sit, waiting to be joining be 3 others going to your same area.
All the above collectively means that a prudent person will order the exact color and options that they want, not compromising based on what is currently know today — for as the above limited examples show, what we think we know today can change (confirmed by both C6 and C7 history). Even GM can not now predict when you car will be made when, nor shipped when, and as history has shown, often constraints are predicted for a specific time period, such as four weeks, but it turns out to be three weeks or even just two weeks.
Please, please, please do not decide to now give up on your chosen color nor an option because it seems today to be a little production schedule constrained! If you do, and say your second choice color car arrives at your house on Feb 1st, but then you go to a Cars-and-Coffee just a week or two later to see a C8 in the color you really wanted right there looking even more spectacular than yours...
So you got smart and lucky, and you dodged constraints, went to a dealer that go you a first month allocation, and that dealer selected your order to match with it for that first consensus, and further that your color choice and option choices were not constrained. Let’s call you Customer “A.” And in this hypothetical but realistic recounting of what could well happen again for the C8, Customer A had many, many friends who too were very lucky and got their orders made in the first few week or two of production.
Meanwhile I (“customer B”) who had my deposit down with a top dealer for over 4 years, chose to get mine in Long Beach Red (or Elkhart Lake Blue) , and so the earliest consensus that my order could go was a initial consensus starting in October. So I, Customer B, who also had many, many friends, thought we were not getting our cars as early as Customer A and his/her many friends.
SURPRISE, for fast forward to the first deliveries roughly around February 1, 2020 could be mostly Customer B and his/her friends.
How could that happen?
Several things, some of which can work for you and some of which will definitely work against you.
1. Unknowns of so many kinds/types:
*GM rejecting all of a suppliers’ submitted specific part: This has happened in the past, for example effecting the delivery schedule of the 2006 Z06’s when GM rejected 100% of the first batch of polished wheels for “intermittent cloudiness.” This resulted in my own Z06 which normally would not have been made until month two of the production process, becoming the the very first C6 Z06 NCM Museum Delivery. What at the last minute, the supplier to critical Mag Ride parts can not meet the BGA quality standards, and GM substitutes other parts, or moves up other carryover colors?
*Supplier issues: Such as a Plant malfunction due to a fire (which has happened before during the C7 generation) that plant making just the part you need for your car, but when the plant resumed production two weeks later and got caught up on those parts quickly, might choosing your second or third choice color just to get into the first month’s of allocation been a smart decision?
* GM finding some issues with quality control and due to the amount of vehicles needed that issue fixed before shipping, those cars actually arrived in customer hands later (even though they were the first C7’s made. This is exactly what happened to the earliest of C7’s made. In fact, most of the earliest ones were shipped to an offsite location for repair — which resulted in more than a few later produced C7’s getting into customers’ hand earlier than the first ones.
*BGA’s traditional two week Christmas/New Year’s vacation: What if your car was scheduled to be completed the day before the vacation were to start, but initial C8 production was slowed down from theoretical just 2%, resulting in your car and others not being completed before the vacation started, and instead your C8 and others being sentenced to a two week hibernation in the middle of the Trim # 1 line. And guess whose cars might be less than a couple of hours, maybe even less the 100’ feet behind yours, the first of the next batch of painted ones.
*Your C8 was selected for a supplemental Quality Control (QC) audit (something highly desirable IMO). While this usually means a delay of two days, some have during that audit review been found to have an issue that takes a moderate amount of time to fix.
2. BGA Quality Control Hold (QCH):
Whenever a new generation starts, in order to insure that there are no quality issues found within the first month, GM batch holds those initial cars on BGA grounds. While none of us nor GM yet knows the length of the C8’s initial QCH, most speculate it would be a month long. Could be longer. Could be less.
What happens to those cars? After they are assembled, they are placed parked outside for the remaining of the QC hold. For the C7, around 1,500 of the first produced ones were placed into the hold area. Might your early produced C8 be “trapped” by other, later-produced cars around yours — just as many earlier C7’s were.
3. Transport process:
Please ask yourself, that once the hold is over, are there enough transport trucks to take them out the gate the same day? Not even close, so what if your car was made day one and it was parked, then as the next few weeks went buy, more and more C7’s were parked completely around yours. Look at the closest yellow C7 in the above picture, then the second one behind it. What if your C7, made during week one, was one so far back in this picture, that you can not even see it (BTW what happened to mine).
GM batch ships 11 C8’s per Jack Cooper Transport. They are not going to send a transporter with only eight of them. Let us imagine you live rural, Texas (or anywhere other than in a highly populated area). GM has six C8’s rearing to go to your home county, but no others, but where you live is not on the path to another location where they could unload some here, some there, along the way. So those eight sit, waiting to be joining be 3 others going to your same area.
All the above collectively means that a prudent person will order the exact color and options that they want, not compromising based on what is currently know today — for as the above limited examples show, what we think we know today can change (confirmed by both C6 and C7 history). Even GM can not now predict when you car will be made when, nor shipped when, and as history has shown, often constraints are predicted for a specific time period, such as four weeks, but it turns out to be three weeks or even just two weeks.
Please, please, please do not decide to now give up on your chosen color nor an option because it seems today to be a little production schedule constrained! If you do, and say your second choice color car arrives at your house on Feb 1st, but then you go to a Cars-and-Coffee just a week or two later to see a C8 in the color you really wanted right there looking even more spectacular than yours...
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