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Comment by suneilp | Hacker News Reader

"the price of the cars that are sold needs to be high enough to cover the costs of building and storing the unsold ones."

We shouldn't be having this problem anymore. It's a massive detriment to the economies of scale model. Most people don't need to buy a car overnight, which ironically is because they are so expensive.

Keeping a small amount of cars for test driving and personal inspection is all that is needed. Then all that needs to be done is to batch up requests for production and shipping. Charge more 2 day shipping. Maybe Amazon can get into selling cars and same day deliveries for free with Amazon Prime.

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In Europe, only used cars are sold directly off the parking lot or showroom of the dealer.

Normally, you choose the options (color, engine options, leather seats, ..) and the car is built for you. You can pick it up some weeks/months later.

Manufacturers of high-priced cars may invite you to pick up the car at the plant when it comes off the line. They have a special "experience" designed around that.

> They have a special "experience" designed around that.

This can happen in the US too: http://www.chevrolet.com/bowling-green-assembly-plant.html

Been there to the Corvette plant. It's a wonderful tour. There is even a section of the plant where the owner of the car can help build the engine. They put a special plate on the engine with the name of the owner too.

To be honest, should it really take months to produce and ship that one car through europe? Surely assembly lines are faster than that.

Assembly lines require a huge investment and cannot scale beyond their maximum capacity. So when a car turns out to be popular, the OEM (the brand that does final assembly) or one of the many suppliers might run into a huge backlog.

That is most pronounced when orders spike after the introduction of a new model.

This has nothing to do with the colour and seats though. When "your" car finally rolls of the line to should take ... what? 1 working day to spray it the colour that you want and let the paint dry, an hour to bolt in your choice of seats and Cd/Mp3 player.

That is not how car production works. Paint is literally the second thing that occurs after a chassis and body panels are applied. But otherwise, the working time on a car from start to finish, including paint, is somewhere in the 10-20 hour range. Theoretically, your timeline could work but paint takes time to cure, then needs polish and interior features take a while, although CAN-BUS has certainly made the electronics easier.

And nobody claimed otherwise. Order backlogs introduce the large delays; manufacturing/shipping takes days or at most two weeks.

Why would a custom order need more capacity? Either a buy a standard model or I buy a custom model. The assembly line is basically the same, just a few different input parts. The assembly line will be rolling out the same number of cars per day. The difference being my custom order got sent to the factory and the next car started on the line was my car.

They're much faster than that. Individual cars are produced in under 24 hours time wise across pretty much every major manufacturer.

There are other reasons than just manufacturing time, for why a vehicle would take weeks or months to get.

What matters obviously is how many cars can they roll out in a day. Sure, from the time your car starts to the time it rolls out is 24 hours, but how many other cars came out in the same day? If the average daily demand for custom vehicles is significantly higher that the daily production capacity you get long wait times just because the job queue is backed up.

So yes, 'manufacturing time' is likely not the issue, it's 'manufacturing capacity' that will bog you down.

If you start with a few stock models, and then all you're picking is the colour of the paint and the style of the seats and a few other bolt-on parts; then no, it should not really take long.

Nope, with some cars the next available spot in factory is months and months away. Try ordering a new Range Rover - standard wheel base model can now be ordered for the end of 2016, long wheel base you would get delivered around March 2017 if you ordered one now. Apparently that's because there's only one assembly line in their factory in Solihull, and there's thousands and thousands of orders from all over the world.

To be fair, waiting time for a new Qashqai(which is a very popular car) is still 3-4 months, because the factory is that busy.

I think distribution would be a big factor here as well. Ideally manufacturers would like to batch shipping as well, which may require some minimum number of orders from a particular area for a particular type of car.

In "Europe"....again you are trying to make it sound like everywhere is the same. I've bought many new cars in "Europe" and it was always off the lot. I'm really not interested in waiting 5-6 months for a new car. Especially since waiting time for some, like the new Range Rover is 12-18 months, which is just insane. If you don't have a car in stock, I'm walking out of the dealership.

Then you should be willing to pay for inventory and overstock. I find that to be a waste. Then again I'm the kind of person who when the time comes can likely find a car that I will be fine with from a selection of a dozen. I'm also fine with waiting for a month or so.

Europe seems like an interesting country indeed. In many countries on the continent we call Europe, it works differently. I'm in a european country, and next-door to my office is a Porsche dealership where new cars roll out daily, filled with young men satisfied they used their whole bonus.

> I'm in a european country, and next-door to my office is a Porsche dealership where new cars roll out daily, filled with young men satisfied they used their whole bonus.

Why do you think that they didnt order it a few weeks/months ago?

Not the GP, but I can confirm the way GGP describes is not the case in all european countries.

Here dealers have inventory and sell from it. I know because we've had issues where people buy "new" cars that are in fact the previous years model that's been sitting in a warehouse for a while. This then causes confusion as they're first registered when they're sold, and the owner doesn't realise he has the older model.

Chances are they ordered those cars several weeks/months before.

> Europe seems like an interesting country indeed

Yes, indeed!

khgvljhkb was, of course, being sarcastic to make their point.

> Normally, you choose the options (color, engine options, leather seats, ..) and the car is built for you. You can pick it up some weeks/months later.

Both times I bought a new car, it was because my previous car had been totaled.

This would hugely complicate my day-to-day logistics. Is there no way to get a normal car quickly, the same day?

Can you not get a car rental, provided by your insurance company, until you've purchased a new vehicle?

You're always going to pay a premium for getting something fast. For an expensive item like a car, that premium is going to be huge.

Sometimes it happens that you need a car immediately. That doesn't mean that you need to buy a car immediately. There are other options.

Imagine if your house burned down. You need housing right away. Are you going to say, "I need to buy a new house today"? Of course not. It's a huge purchase that requires a great deal of research and thought. In the unlikely event that you can find something you can move into immediately, you'll have extremely restricted choices and probably pay way more than you needed to. Instead, you'll find a hotel, maybe move into a short-term apartment, and take the time you need to find a house to buy.

Cars aren't nearly as expensive as houses (usually) but they're still expensive enough that the same ideas apply. You're going to own this thing for years, you can take a some time to get it right when buying it, even if you need something immediately.

> You're always going to pay a premium for getting something fast. For an expensive item like a car, that premium is going to be huge.

At least right now in the US, there is no premium for buying a new car in a single day.

> It's a huge purchase that requires a great deal of research and thought. In the unlikely event that you can find something you can move into immediately, you'll have extremely restricted choices and probably pay way more than you needed to.

A car isn't anything like a house. Pretty much every house is different. The location of the house matters and can't be changed. House build quality varies tremendously, requiring in-depth inspections. There's a ton of paperwork to get through, with 24 hour periods on offers and counteroffers common.

Cars come off an assembly line. Every 2015 Honda Civic is like every other 2015 Honda Civic with some minor differences in trim that you can evaluate online or within five minutes of getting into the car at the dealership.

As long as you know what kind of car you want, which you probably already do, there's nothing to "get right". (Although there's things you could do wrong, I suppose: don't walk in and tell the salesman "hey I really need a car asap.")

The dealer usually has some stock of the most common models and configurations that you can purchase right away. The car is custom built only if you don't like any of the available configurations (mostly happens for non-popular colors or extras).

Also dealers can co-operate and if one doesn't have the configuration you like, he may search for availability from other dealers.

Ugh this is how furniture works in the UK, honestly it's very frustrating to find the right bed or couch and then have to wait 8 weeks for it to be assembled and delivered.

I think manufacturers are going in the opposite direction now, though.

When I bought my VW they had just recently (within past 2-3 years) changed to a packaged model for options where you had to buy options together, and packages were dependent on others in tiers. So e.g. if I wanted the xenon headlights or the 'kessy' keyless entry and start, I had to buy the option package with those, which I think also included an upgraded stereo system. This package required another option package full of other things I didn't want (sunroof, sat nav), so in short if I wanted fancy headlights I had to buy a whole slew of other things to get them. In the past I could have ordered those headlights separately. I ended up not getting any extra options.

I think what's going on is that they want to be able to forecast how much of each option they need, and they want to be able to turn around on a new car purchase quickly. If it was all custom, they either have to build it overseas and ship it - takes a long time - or they have to ship generic cars here and install the options somewhere else, like the dealership, where they have inventory and tooling and personnel costs issues. It's much easier to produce 1000 red cars with option package a and reduce choice for the customer, as long as they go for it.

Based on the fact that a large industry is not doing this I would guess there are some reason it's not a good idea economically. I don't see an obvious flaw in your suggestion, but it's so simple that someone in the industry have to have come up with it already and decided not to do it.

Might just be a regulatory reason, though. Not a technical one.

> Most people don't need to buy a car overnight

Simply not true in America, at least the poor half of America. Perhaps most people don't need to buy a new car overnight. But a car? They do. Cars break down, get in accidents. You need to drive to your job or you lose it. You need a car.

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