"Left the Plant"

Our van drama continues...

Earlier I blogged about the amount of time that it is taking our new Ford Transit Connect cargo van to arrive.  Once the van gets on a ship from Europe, the transit time is probably around four to five weeks.  Of course nobody at the Ford dealer is willing to commit to any timeline, knowing that far too many factors are beyond their control.  But at this point, if the van has not yet left Spain and if it will take four or five weeks to get here once it does, it will show up about one month before we leave.  And there will be a LOT of things that need to happen in that span of time, not the least of which is to sell both our CX-5 and our house at a fair market price.  But the less time we have before we leave, the more the odds will increase that we'll be pressured to sell for less (though if that happens, we'll likely just winterize the house and sell it next spring).

A week or so ago, our salesman had talked about how he had constantly been checking the status of our van over the past months, and it had been sitting on the dock in Spain ever since rolling off the assembly line in early March.  So I sought to have him tell me just what sorts of status updates that he would be getting from Ford's system.  The idea would be that perhaps we'd at least know when it was on a ship and thus have a reasonably concrete expectation of when it might arrive, and we'd be able to assess what impact that arrival date would have on our plans (we plan on leaving on schedule, come hell or high water, even if it means not selling our house until next spring - if the van is still not here we'd do the first couple of weeks of our trip with our CX-5 and then return to Boise when the van is ready to be picked up).

Anyway, we e-mailed the salesman and waited for a response.  After a few days with no response I left him a voice mail.  Things got a bit twisted up playing phone tag, but eventually we got him on the phone.  Suddenly, he says "Good news!  The van has left the plant!"  Huh?  For two and a half months we've been told that it has been sitting on the dock in Valencia, so how is it that the status is now "left the plant?"  To my cynical mind, and based upon past experiences from salespeople that only tell you what they think you want to hear, this new information sounded dubious.  After all, this is the guy who over a month ago said we'd almost certainly see the van by the end of next week, but now he's saying it's still overseas.

So a long discussion followed about what sorts of updates the Ford system provides, with our main interest being at what point we'd know that the van was in the country.  It was during that discussion that I started to get the sense we were being BS'd, as he couldn't or wouldn't give us the specifics that we were asking for.

We recently discovered that there is a Ford Transit Connect Forum, so I signed up and looked around to see what information was available to help in designing the layout of our gear.  In doing so I happened to find where someone had ordered their TC on the 14 Dec 2014, and it arrived at the dealer on 5 May 2015.   So if our van has an identical lead time, it should arrive sometime around the 10th of June, assuming that the production backlog hadn't increased over the five weeks before we placed our order.

A look at Google Maps shows that the Ford Espana plant is located 10 miles south of the dock at Valencia.  There are huge lots of parked vehicles at the plant (in addition to massive amounts of employee parking), and an equally huge lot of parked vehicles at the port.  So it seems that "left the port" likely means that our van is finally queued up to be loaded onto a cargo ship.  If so, and if that means in the next few days that it will be loaded onto a ship, then the last week or so in June would seem to be the earliest that it is likely that we will see it.

So increasingly we are thinking the thought of selling our house this summer may be unrealistic, though if we soon know for certain that our van is definitely in transit that will be enough for us to go ahead with putting it on the market.  We aren't too concerned about being able to sell it this year, as it is an appreciating asset, and will be worth more next spring.  Our main concern is selling our CX-5, as it a declining asset and will be worth less next spring, so we'd definitely prefer to sell it as soon as possible once the van arrives.