Good deal on a Chrysler 300? | Page 2 | GTAMotorcycle.com

Good deal on a Chrysler 300?

If it makes you feel any better, the car in question looked a lot like this
TULSA142481.jpg

'74-76 Torino (For you youngin's, Google Starsky and Hutch... it was a thing), and YES they used coloured build sheets.
This is from back in the day that if you wanted a Ford pickup in any body style other than a standard two door, the body was built in a small industrial unit on Royal Windsor Dr. by four old guys with thick italian accents.

Loved that car. I know. Seems weird that a kid would think a Gran Torino was cool. But it was. Haha. Watched all the shows with cool cars. Knight rider, Simon and Simon, Miami vice, magnum pi. I'm sure I'm missing some.
 
Even plugging a new piece of hardware into a computer sometimes needs a "driver" to make it talk to the computer and work. Think along the same lines for cars.
This analogy is exactly what I meant, though. Sure, PC hardware needs drivers but these days, Windows ships with 95% of the drivers that you would need - I can do a clean offline install of Windows 10 and in most cases, ALL of the hardware on the computer will work. Now I recognize that it has been a long non-trivial road to get there - stuff like EDID to get displays to "just work", USB device classes to get most USB devices to work, HD Audio for sound, AHCI for storage controllers, blah blah blah. But the way auto manufacturers handle hardware configurations is extremely rigid, more than I think it has to be
 
Stuff like this happens periodically, I have seen a few cars come in with close but different coloured seats. You're not getting a discount, dealer will submit a warranty claim to install the correct parts.
 
If it makes you feel any better, the car in question looked a lot like this
TULSA142481.jpg

'74-76 Torino (For you youngin's, Google Starsky and Hutch... it was a thing), and YES they used coloured build sheets.
This is from back in the day that if you wanted a Ford pickup in any body style other than a standard two door, the body was built in a small industrial unit on Royal Windsor Dr. by four old guys with thick italian accents.
Torinos were built in Oakville until Aug '73.
I started the day they phased them out, when the full size LTD and Merc began production.
 
Stuff like this happens periodically, I have seen a few cars come in with close but different coloured seats. You're not getting a discount, dealer will submit a warranty claim to install the correct parts.
Happens to all manufacturers.....we had a Tacoma that showed up with the 60% of the 60/40 back seats in grey and the other 40 in tan.
 
It would greatly simplify things at the manufacturing end (body control modules would be practically universal, just pull one off the stack) and at the service end (don't need a super complex programming tool that techs have to be trained to configure for every possible option combination, there's only 1-3 possible software packages to flash)
How BMW does that:

Modules (hardware) are different at the factory - lets take, for example, PDC (parking sensor) module. If the car got only rear parking sensors - module will have only one connector for a rear set of sensors. I guess saving a few bucks from each will amount to a few millions in the end. But they have only one PDC module that goes into the spare parts - with all possible hardware, so they have to carry less parts.

But the software is the same for all variations of hardware. After installing the module technic has to "code" it using vehicle order, that is saved in two different modules of the car. Coding software enables or disables certain features of the module taking into account vehicle order. So certain features can be enabled or disabled by modifying vehicle order and coding the specific module. Vehicle order is used as well to code regional/market differences.
 
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If you think the way the mainstream manufacturers program their cars and such, for those not in the know, you should get a lot of what Tesla does....they basically build the exact same cars for everyone (including in many cases, battery sizes/capacities) and then software cripple anything that the buyer didn't pay for. So your car might have a huge battery actually under there, but if you didn't pay for the "extended range" version of the car they just cripple the battery to a lower capacity.

The same thing right down to features like heated seats. They have the heaters in there, and they're even wired up, but if you don't pay for them, the option to turn them on is just removed in software.

Some crafty people have started to find ways to hack these sorts of things and get features they weren't originally supposed to have, but Tesla is playing cat and mouse with that too.

The ultimate insult? Even if a previous owner paid for all sorts of expensive options (like the $10,000 self-drive option) on a used Tesla you're buying, Tesla might remove the option after you buy the car and make you pay for it all over again.
 
I find it hard to believe that manual build-sheet tampering would have worked at any time in the last 20 years. The build configuration is electronic, and everything on it gets distributed to the suppliers who get a build sequence of parts to supply, and those end up at the line just-in-time. The chap on the line just puts on whatever part is put in front of them - he doesn't get to pick and choose. The customers that supply interior components have the worst of this, because the build sequence could want (let's say) a grey headliner no sunroof, followed by another grey headliner with sunroof, followed by a black one for panoramic glass roof, followed by a beige one with sunroof, etc etc. They handle this by having racks of each configuration stored in an ASRS (automatic storage and retrieval system), and a robotic picker picks them out in the build sequence and puts them in a shipping rack in the right order. There's no way for anyone at that point in the process to know which vehicle is destined for an employee ... As an aside, I know someone who worked at a plant that supplied steering wheels to Ford Oakville. Multiply the possible combinations of colour, which model of car it's for, which trim level it has (the steering wheel buttons are different), and it ended up at several hundred possible steering wheel variations!

Monkeying around to some extent certainly isn't impossible ... someone on the line may have access to the parts for the next few cars in sequence, which might open up the possibility of swapping which part goes on this car with what was supposed to go on the next one, thus resulting in two messed-up units ...
What I noted was 1992....

Another one that happened back then was one of the QC guys removed the steering wheel nut. It got checked a couple of times on the line, the last guy removed it instead of "checking it". Luckily the next guy installing the the rest of the wheel trim stopped the line. QC guy was actually fired after an investigation.
 
I knew someone who worked at the Chrysler plant in Brampton pre-2008 as a floor sweeper/janitor. According to them the job was dubbed "hide and seek for a thousand a week", because you could basically disappear and do nothing as long as no one caught you (even then the consequences were tame). They also had people whose sole job was checking cars on the line because workers would pass out in them and get injured. People being drunk or coming to work coked up as also the norm.

In contrast I know someone who works in QA at the RAV4 assembly in Woodstock. They run a highly automated and advanced plant where a new RAV4 rolls off the line every 52 seconds. It's not a union shop but the workers are paid well, take pride in their work, and turnover is very low.
 
reminds me of my cousin who worked at the Ford engine plant in windsor years ago

the disgruntled union workers were upset that that they were building engines for mexican Ford plant, so they use to put their paystubs in the crates as the engines got shipped to mexico....
 
I knew someone who worked at the Chrysler plant in Brampton pre-2008 as a floor sweeper/janitor. According to them the job was dubbed "hide and seek for a thousand a week", because you could basically disappear and do nothing as long as no one caught you (even then the consequences were tame). They also had people whose sole job was checking cars on the line because workers would pass out in them and get injured. People being drunk or coming to work coked up as also the norm.

In contrast I know someone who works in QA at the RAV4 assembly in Woodstock. They run a highly automated and advanced plant where a new RAV4 rolls off the line every 52 seconds. It's not a union shop but the workers are paid well, take pride in their work, and turnover is very low.
Haha. I worked in a food production factory for a while. The janitors had divided off a section of their supply room to make a hidden bedroom. They had a rotating schedule for who got to sleep each day. It was there for decades before management figured it out and removed it.
 
That car passed at least 3 inspector stations during assembly since that trim didn't go on, and skipped through final inspection.
I've seen ltd/mercury, escort /lynx, tempo / topaz with each others parts "leave the building". No one really cares inside.

All cars are somewhere on the line on a friday afternoon (and tuesday morning, and thursday night, etc).
And now that plant is getting a refit to become a amazon dist joint....
 
Here's one better. A guys buys a new truck and his friends install large tie wraps on the drive shaft. "what is that clicking?" "it increases as I speed up"
 

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