DETROIT—Toyota Motor Corp. and Fuji Heavy Industries' Subaru unit have canceled overtime shifts in North America in the face of potential shortages of parts from Japan.

Overtime shifts vary from plant to plant and from day to day, and very few of Toyota's eight North American car plants had been running extra time, said company spokesman Mike Michels. Subaru shares a plant with Toyota in Lafayette, Ind.

"There is no sense to burn through making cars and then be forced to stop" if a shortage of parts does occur, Mr. Michels said.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704662604576202951161317580.html

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They already suspended production in Japan, and now the U.S.

I just heard on the radio that they are suspending in the U.S. because the hundreds of small suppliers can't get parts to the Japanese and U.S. factories.

But this article kind of contradicts the latter part, in that is indicates 70%-80% of the suppliers for the U.S. built cars are located in the U.S.

So, getting parts for Japanese autos built here should not be as much of a problem.

Some of those small parts might include specific part that cannot be readily substituted by domestic American parts.


Let me make a prediction, if the Japanese suppliers are unable to meet the demand more parts will end up getting made here in the US.

It still takes 100% of the suppliers getting their parts to the plants to build a car.

This is going to be very bad for the "recovery".

I think we will need more stimulus and quantitative easing.

Its all part of the plan - the Halliburton weather machine made the mess in Japan just so Toyota can have problems and Government Motors can increase sales and production.

I work for a company (finally got an engineering job after almost two years of un-employment/under-employment) that rebuilds engines/transmissions and hydraulics for a Japanese heavy equipment manufacturer. We have always had issues getting the bearing, seals and other components we need from the "home office" in Japan and now this disaster. On Monday the managers we just blowing off the situation but today they all looked like they had been raided by the popo and their dogs we shot (just had to throw that one in there). Anyway, we are doing the same thing, no over time, no expedited orders and the buyers are trying to get as many components in here as possible. The catch for us is that we use OEM parts, no substitutions allowed. We are looking into alternate sourcing for what parts we can, probably from China. Probably going to begin searching for another job, well OK I already started. Don't want to go through that hell again.

Indy

Generally, the specific parts not being made here are certain sensors, cam assemblies and transmissions. They are made by Asin which to me is Toyota, however everybody and I mean everybody uses these parts. I would expect Ford, Mazda, GM and several others to have issues as well.

I suspect one of the problems is the small mfgs may have been wiped out, thus no supplier at all and possibly no tooling/molds either. The other massive problem is that you can not bring up a automated factory or CNC machines with rolling black outs, this could cause your servos on the robots or CNCs to hard crash making a very bad situation much worse.

As it is, I bet every reseller/salvager of cnc/servo controllers the world over is going to be sold out by next week.

Plus, the Obama shit administration's PR department had out over the last two years, that Toyota cars sucked.

oh fuck.

we have Nissan and Toyota plants in MS.

Goddamit, I was just about to buy a Tundra. I bet prices are going to get jacked.

Tundra(the big one anyways) is made in Texas and they use mostly US suppliers for that.

Honestly, Cadillac uses more parts from Japan than that.

No doubt. Lucky I'm not in a rush to buy a new ride.

Wait a minute.. are you guys saying that relying on imports can hurt our economy?