Japanese automakers in Thailand are resuming production in the inundated country, all except Honda.
Toyota is back at normal levels in Thailand, Japan, and the U.S. Production in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and South Africa is still affected by missing parts originating from Thailand. This should even out soon. Toyota had said that it had lost 150,000 vehicles through November 12.
The Nikkei [sub] says that Honda lost nearly 100,000 units of production through Monday. Honda has no idea when it will open its submerged plant .
The Nikkei also says that Mazda will restart pickup truck output on Nov. 28 at its joint venture plant with Ford Motor Co.
Parts problems could persist for a while. Rohm, a chipmaker for automotive use, told The Nikkei that output will not return to normal until next spring.
The talk now is that the Japanese are going to make their expansion into Vietnam and Indonesia a top priority (not to mention Mexico). This should shelter them from natural disasters, currency fluctuations, and political instability.
But their Asian supply chain network should be well diversified from risk. A hard lesson learned after the March quakes and now the floods. But the trend also seems to be smaller factories in more locations. Obviously, TTAC has covered it before:
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/02/toyota%E2%80%99s-secret-weapon-low-cost-car-factories/
An interesting example is Mazda’s new Vietnam mini-plant in Quang Nam. It plans on making just 2,000-3,000 Mazda 2/Demios a YEAR (with a 10k vehicles per shift a year maximum capacity). The factory itself is just 75k square meters. The factory will average just 8 cars a day, with a maximum capacity of building just 27 cars a day.
In addition to the production losses in the hundreds of thousands, the automakers also lost a lot of new cars waiting to be shipped out. Honda has lost at least a thousand new cars awaiting shipment when their plant was completely inundated.
http://www2.picturepush.com/photo/a/7019430/img/7019430.bmp
I know dual-purpose vacations are part of modern living, but I wouldn’t have thought to include saving my car with a nice, long Malaysian holiday.