s2kdriver80
Senior Member
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- Nov 21, 2015
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- Location
- Long Island, New York, United States
- Vehicle(s)
- MY21 FK8 Honda Civic Type R, MY03 AP1 Honda S2000
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I'd be pretty nervous putting all of my Type R engines for the year in one basket, lest something were to happen to the ship.You have to think like an auto executive. The Type-R is not the Honda Corp "Halo" car. That role is fulfilled by the NSX. The Civic brand is tied to reliability and value and the Type-R is the sporting representative of that. We would need to bring in a Honda Exec for a final answer, but I don't see a diminished profit on Type-Rs. Remember, we are talking Honda Corp profit, not dealer profit.
Looking at shipping, a modern container ship can carry tens of thousands of automobile engines at a time. The average container ship can transport over 3,500 containers at a time and each container can hold many engines. The largest container ships can have over 15,000 containers per voyage. Moving 10,000 automobile engines in a single voyage is trivial if that is what Honda decided to do.
Please also note that I did not quote the "make as many" statement. I used an actual quote from John Mendel (American Honda Executive VP) that stated "a couple thousand a month". I don't see any ambiguity in that statement. Continuing on the Honda statement front, they actually said their initial US hatchback sales target (all variants) is 50,000/year. Bear in mind that hatchbacks are more popular in other parts of the world than the US so that is a reasonable contribution to an eventual 250,000/year production total. A final note on Swindon, the plant is currently fully capable of producing 150,000 cars a year. Restoring the second line would bring capacity to 250,000/year.
All in all, the business case for 10,000 to 20,000 Type-Rs a year is clear.
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