There's this wonderful invention known as the "railroad." Perhaps you've heard of it. Along with that is another neat thing called "Multi-mode transport," where the same container starts off attached to a truck, is lifted off and placed on a rail car, only to be stacked 20 units high on a ship two days later.

 

No need to be a smartass.

I'll believe you Mickster, but the sticker does say "For Vehicles in This Carline" it's 70% US/Canadian, 15% Japan. Below that, it says "For This Vehicle" final assembly point is Japan.

 

That was not me being the smartass (check who sent it)

In fact I did check with Honda and they had to go check, but the Civic Hybrid is considered one carline, the Civic EX another, Civic Si another and so on as the labels go.

 

Okay, I'm glad we got the parts content issue settled, and now we can all go back to being our regularly civil (Civic) selves.

I know about railroads & multimodal transport, but assumed that they would still manufacture parts in Japan. I guess American Honda is just doing its bit to restore our trade balance!

Aneil

 

Me? Civil? Must be dreaming Nah, I was just in one of my moods, brought on by the fact that it's been raining just about every day for the past three weeks straight (and costing me about 4mpg). I'm not sure just how much the back-and-forth of the car parts and finished cars affects the trade balance. It's entirely possible that that part of it is more or less a wash. What does help are the soybeans we send over, since that's a direct "We grow, you buy" transaction.

 

I remember when we (US) had legislated some trade barriers and foreign (Japenese) car companies had to produce "X" number of cars in the U.S. to mitigate import taxes. Perhaps this is in a similar vein - e.g. perhaps we have some quotas around parts being made in the U.S.

Other than that the only other reason I could see is that Honda wanted to have a tighter grip on the technology until it met some internal metrics for quality. If that's true than I guess we are at that point since it seems like the Camry hybrid will be produced in Tennessee later this year.


Dan

 

Well, you know, we caucasians are so tall, our eyes too far away from what we're working on.