My dealer of choice had allocation for 6 left last time I talked to him, and that's only 1 out 4 major local dealers.

Yes & no.

Franchise rules say a U.S. dealer cannot sell a new car to a Canadian to be taken back to Canada. They "could" have their franchise pulled over it. There's also a 6 month, 6,000 mile delay before the warranty gets honored in Canada.

Add the import costs, fees, aggravation and limited financing options and it becomes a process that relatively few undertake. With the way our dollars is tanking, it may not be cost effective either.

I've done it, but only because for one, the price difference was just too big to ignore, and for the other, after having an order in the system for 7 months and no TPW in sight, I sourced what I wanted out of U.S. dealer inventory.

 

From absolute raw materials I'd say a long time. But once on the assmbley line pretty quick. When I toured the Corvette plant, that assmbley line crawled at a snails pace. At the end though, in a short amount of time I still saw serveral cars come off of the line.

 

obviously from raw materials it takes a long time. this car has been three years in the making. i was meaaning the assembly line time. how long on the assembly line does it take to complete 1 car? and it soundsl ike right now 1 day is about the right time.

 

That's stupied... These regulations are soo annoying. You should of seen what I had to do to get the skyline in the U.S.

 

1 car every 60 seconds (1 car/minute) ... not 1 every second!!!
Not really . Have you ever seen a production line in action? I obviously haven't seen the Camaro line going, but I took a tour of the truck plant a few years ago ... there was a clock ticking at the end of the line ... a full size, extended-cab Silverado or Sierra would roll off the line every ~57 - 63 seconds from what I counted (yes, we stood and watched for a few minutes!! ). It's actually mind boggling when you think about it.

You got it .

That sounds about right. Again, we won't know the full capacity time of the Camaro for awhile until they ramp up production, but typically, I think the build time for cars in Oshawa has been around a ~day or so. May be ~16 hours or something? (ie: 2 full shifts from start to finish). If they are only going to work an 8-hour day shift, I doubt that any cars will finish within 1 shift ... they probably stop the line at the end of the day, and wherever they leave off, they pick up and start from the next day. Still, while running at normal capacity, the line should produce a new Camaro every ~60 seconds . Man, what a beautiful picture that will be!!!

 

What happened to "free trade"?

 

I don't know if it's an international trade issue as much as it's a franchise issue at the dealer level.

 

Shouldn't it be the buyers responsibility, not the sellers?

 

Its allowing American dealers to import Camaros.

 

Sorry to hear anyone has to deal with those issues. I guess doing anything internationally as an individual is full of such complications. It must be difficult to be a smaller business and deal with such issues.

 

Things are really screwy sometimes. I was talking to a ship captain from Croatia a few months ago. He was looking at buying a Corvette here locally and having it shipped. He said it was MUCH cheaper than buying in Europe.

 

I believe it's set up that way to protect the dealers. How happy would a Canadian dealer be if his customer could simply drive a few miles South and pick up the same car for a few thousand bucks cheaper and then drive it back to Canada? I guess it could be set up so that the purchaser had to pay the difference (for example, I live in Missouri, but if I go buy a car in Kansas I still have to pay Missouri sales tax for the car) but that's not the way the laws are currently configured.

 

I will make a some guesses on time. 4 hours in body, 4 in paint, and 6 to get through General Assembly. Plus there is usually a bank between each one of those that can eat up an hour or two. There is a lot of parallel path stuff too: The engines are getting assembled before the car drops into GA, the body subassemblies are built up before getting welded onto the BIW, the chassis is built up seperately before being married to the body.

-Geoff

 

If it took a whole day to build one car then with there being 10,000+ preorders then we would be waiting a while don't you think.

 

no, because you would have an assembly line going. one starts and then theres another one after it. its not, you do one and then the next day you start another. you start one and then right after that you start another one. the first car wont be done for a day or maybe less but then there will be another camaro 1 minute right after it.