Some new tidbits of information
I posted a snarky comment on a picture of the PacHy on the Chrysler Facebook page about how they won't deliver them (mine is 139 days since ordered) and an assembly line worker happened to see my comment and PM'd me. He's clearly proud of what they are building and was kind enough to answer a few questions I had about this whole thing. He seemed like an honest, nice guy who likes his job and just wants to help. I don't want to give away his identity or anything because I don't know what FCA's policy is on this sort of thing, and I wouldn't want him to get in trouble if he wasn't supposed to say something. As far as I can tell there isn't anything sensitive here but who knows. If only FCA PR did their jobs better we wouldn't have to pump their employees for the tiniest shred of information...
Anyway, here's what he had to say...
- Chrysler engineers have been working on the PIM problem "round the clock".
- After changing the diodes it turns out they had to change "multiple other things" on the PIM to get it to "work smoothly" so it was apparently a very challenging problem to solve.
I got the impression that a lot of smart people have spent a lot of time working on this problem but they seem to have cracked it now...
- The Windsor plant expects to be up and running with the fixed PIMs by the "end of the month".
When he told me that bit, I asked about the regular summer shutdown...
- Regular July vacation is still happening, the rest of the plant is off for two weeks, but his part of the line only gets one week off because of "demand" and because the production restart isn't nailed down and may happen sooner than the "end of the month" so they want to keep some key parts of the assembly line around in case they start early.
- There is a chance some parts of the assembly line will be made "critical status" which apparently means they run 24/7 for 90 days until they are caught up with demand.
This info may explain why the NHTSA recall notice says owners will be informed by July 24th. It would make sense that they wouldn't want to tell owners that their cars have been recalled until they have a fix available. Personally I think that's stupid of them but whatever. So they seem to have known about being ready by the end of July for a while, perhaps it was a deadline of some sort or maybe a reasonable time estimate from the engineers. Either way it's dumb of FCA to not inform owners and buyers of these timelines. They're just pissing off their customers more by keeping them in the dark.
Given the big question marks about resuming production, I asked if the delays will impact the 2018's. As I expected, he didn't know much about the production planning because he's a worker-bee but when I asked about the 2018's he said they'd probably be "delayed a little" but "not more than a few months". The 2018 stuff is pure speculation, but it is speculation from inside what I'm now calling the 'Chrysler Cone of Silence' so I think it's probably more reliable than most.
Assuming they do implement "critical status", a 3 month delay to the 2018's would make perfect sense. Others have reported that the 2018's would start production on August 7th so assuming that doesn't happen - 90 days would put it at November 5th which indeed would be "a few months" late...
The timing of this production restart does conflict with another report by another assembly line worker who said it had already restarted about two weeks ago now. It's possible that different parts of the assembly process have restarted already. Perhaps the line restarted to complete vehicles that were almost finished when it shut down? The part of the line that involves the PIM though apparently has not restarted yet but will soon.
Fingers crossed that it translates into them finally shipping the ones that have already been built!
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