Are long lead times here to stay?

I have spoken to many friends recently about long lead times in new car orders and the general view is that all the gadgetry and complexity means that long lead times are here to stay on any high range car.

My counter argument is that 'build' techniques, tools, and processes should be developing at the same rate as the technology of the cars and as such, based on relativity, building a car now should take the same amount of time as building a car 20 years ago.

Any thoughts from anyone who has been buying New cars for 20 years or who know more about the manufacturing process than me?

I'd argue that the long lead times we're experiencing here is down to supplier/manufacturing issues, most of, if not all of which can be ironed out.
I think with this being a "mainstream" car, they will not have the luxury of holding long lead times on any new order... I would probably expect new car order to delivery times settling around the 2-3 months time.... instead of 6,7 or 8 months!

Long lead times are not good business sense, Why sell 70000 units when you can double your income to 140000 units. The problem is if you ramp up your production facilities to 140000 only to find demand tails off you can have put a lot of investment into a plant that is no longer required. So there is a trade off over what you can produce to what you can continually sell. I would imagine the new engine plant is a response to the fact JLR are becoming unit production limited on supply of engines.

Most car makers now do not build cars to have them sitting rotting on an old airfield or in a field, they mostly build to order or for dealers to stock and for them to take the hit financially. Today's car manufacturing is also based mostly on the "just in time" parts delivery - as we have seen one or more parts being delayed causes major headaches for a manufacturer made worse when it is s desirable new model with a big order book. Like Racing Snake I would imagine by the spring the lead in for a factory order car will be down to 3 months, just like ordering any other Land Rover product. Also dealer stock will start to reflect the more popular options when they order cars for their stock that have the more popular options on them.

Something else to mention is that the car industry had a real tough time when bank crisis kicked off – remember at one point it was touch and go with JLR with factories lined up for closure (GM did close factories I think) Honda shut up shop for months ... coping with drops in sales of 20-30% meant drastic action. Quite a lot of suppliers went under (certainly in the UK) so now things are picking up again I wonder if there is enough production capacity at the suppliers .... certainly that was the reason I was given for the long delay with the Golf. You can’t just go from 300k units to 700k (VW Golf) overnight even if the factory and production line are designed for those volumes.

When I picked my car up yesterday the dealer said they expected lead times for the Evoque to increase considerably maybe upto 24 months. The reason he gave for this was because LR have drastically underestimated the global demand for the car. This has resulted in delays all down the supply chain. This is frustrating news for the people who are on the list but good news for owners.

(25-10-2011 12:24pm)moonigan Wrote:  When I picked my car up yesterday the dealer said they expected lead times for the Evoque to increase considerably maybe upto 24 months. The reason he gave for this was because LR have drastically underestimated the global demand for the car. This has resulted in delays all down the supply chain. This is frustrating news for the people who are on the list but good news for owners.

Congrats on your new car!

Yes ... my dealer said they have stopped taking deposits for RRE as they were having to quote delivery beyond August 2012.

Oh well there's no rush to order the next one then, maybe leave it until next summer for delivery a year after that! All great news for residuals too.

When I enquired about a factory order Audi A3 prior to choosing the RRE, I was told delivery would be approx 5-6 months for a new A3, which was longer than I would have expected for a relatively common vehicle well into production.

And when I bought a new MX-5 a few years ago, I received it in record time: order to delivery in 2.5 weeks! That was probably because the MX-5 Sport came with all the 'options' as standard, so all you needed to configure was the colour. They already had a load of MX-5 Sports built in various colours waiting in Amsterdam, so it was just a matter of putting it on a boat and sending it over.

I think a lot of it comes down to the vast range of options and trim levels. I doubt hardly any two Evoques will be the same.

When I purchased the RRS, HSE spec pretty much included everything so I managed to source one, in the spec I wanted fairly quickly and beating a 6 month 'lead'.

I guess this is what gives the Evoque it's identity. Reminds me a lot of the mini when it came out. I remember waiting quite a long time for a factory build because I knew I would never find one in the exact spec I wanted. The thing with the mini though, it came the exact week the dealer told me it would. No changes, no delays.