Cutting It Close

Now that it has finally dawned upon us that our car salesman has seriously flubbed our estimated delivery date, it is clear that we could be cutting things very close in the final weeks before our adventure begins.  The eight to twelve week delivery timeline originally given to us by our salesman is actually the production timeline - the time from when an order is placed until the vehicle is produced.  It doesn't include the three months that it takes to get from Spain to Idaho.  

So why does it take three months to get here?  

Well, after the van rolled off the assembly line, it was parked in one of several huge lots at the Ford Espana plant.  I suspect each lot is based upon the intended international destination, thus all the vehicles destined for the U.S. would be parked in a specific lot until there is a sufficient quantity to meet the minimum load requirements of the cargo vessel that will transport them. 

Ford Logistics knows about a month ahead of time when their plant production will result in a full load for a particular destination, giving the shipping company time to factor that into their fleet schedule.  Once the ship is anticipated to be arriving at the port, Ford starts to move the hundreds of vehicles for that cargo-load the 10 miles or so from the plant to the port at Valencia.  This is the meaning of our most recent "left the plant" status - at that time it was sitting on the dock, waiting to be loaded onto a ship.

Ports are fairly efficient, so the ship is loaded within a day or two, once there is space for it to dock.  That should be immediately, as it appears that Ford has its own dock space, or at least there is a single large space there dedicated to storing vehicles for export.

The trip by ship to either New York or New Jersey takes 18 days.  But our van won't get off there, it will be offloaded at Baltimore, Maryland, at Ford's "Modcenter," so it could take a few more days to reach that destination, particularly if some vehicles are offloaded at the other ports (which might make sense, if they don't need to be processed through the Modcenter).

As explained earlier, our van is actually exported in a wagon configuration (i.e., extra seats in the cargo area) in order to avoid a 25% tariff on light trucks nicknamed "the chicken tax."  So all the TC cargo vans on the ship need to be processed through the Modcenter.  There, the extra wagon seating and seat belts are removed and the vinyl cargo load floor and step moulding is installed.  For our windowless version, I believe they remove the fixed glass in the sliding doors and install solid panels in the window openings (I know - that doesn't seem to make sense, but I suspect there is buyer psychology at work there - windows should be standard equipment, but buyers are willing to pay extra for them and would expect to pay less for no windows).

I suspect the Modcenter functions much like the plant in Spain - they have a steady stream of vehicles coming in and going out, and everything gets put into a production queue.  How long it takes to get through the queue is anyone's guess.  It's doubtful that they drop what they are doing and immediately start converting the fresh batch of new vehicles, but I suspect it doesn't take too long before that starts to happen.  After all, these are fairly simple modifications, so the time per vehicle should be fairly short.

From there the van will be put on a rail car.  It will likely follow an approximately 2,100 mile route through Pittsburg, Chicago, Omaha and Cheyenne before ending up in Salt Lake City.  How many times our rail car will be decoupled and put on a different freight train is anyone's guess.  The actual travel time should be two or three days, but that doesn't necessarily include time that the railcar could spend sitting in a rail yard, waiting for an outbound train for a particular route.

The final 350 miles from Salt Lake City to our dealer in Nampa is expected to take from 3 to 5 days, though it is only a day's drive from here.  Once again, vehicles are off loaded and stored until a transport can be scheduled to get them to their destinations.  It is only when our van arrives in Salt Lake City that our dealer starts to have some degree of control over our van's arrival date, but it's not likely that they would be able to speed up our delivery by more than a day or two.

So July 19th would seem to be a realistic guesstimate of when our van will get here (based upon the limited number of delivery timelines that I've found for specific TCs, it could get here a couple of weeks sooner than that, or possibly a week or so later).  If we'd known that up front, we would have stuck to our original plans to tag team from California to Florida starting in September.  Instead, we've relied upon our salesman's misinformed estimated delivery date and our current plans may be somewhat in jeopardy.

Ford recommends that we break the van in for 1,000 miles before we start towing, and it's unlikely we'll have time to do that, unless we luck out and it shows up before the 4th of July (we'll likely inquire whether it is possible for us to go to SLC so that we can pick up the van for delivery to the dealer for final prep, as that would at give us a chance to quickly rack up a lot of non-towing miles before we depart - we're also thinking that once it gets here we'll be making a lot of evening drives to rack up miles before we start towing).  The 19th is less than a week before we'd like to start a leisurely drive to Seattle over a few days time, and if it is ready at the dealer by that date, we'll still need to have the battery isolator, brake controller and 7 pin wiring installed, plus install our plywood load floor, drawer pedestal and the attachment points for storing our bikes. 

So, depending upon when we are actually able to take delivery of our new van, the front end of our planned travel timeline may be at risk.  At this point, the odds are good that the van will arrive before our planned departure.  The odds are less good that we'll have the van set up by that time, but they are probably still a bit better than 50-50 odds.  We're reasonably optimistic that things will fall together on time, but we have no control over some big parts of this puzzle.

The worst likely scenario is that we may end up starting a bit later than we planned.  We'd be greatly disappointed, since that would mean that we would have to shorten the time we'd be able to spend riding with our friend Cary, as it is likely to be a very rare opportunity to have an extra travel companion along with us.  But by increasing our daily mileage and perhaps slogging through some bad weather (rather than waiting it out), in short order we'd likely be back on schedule for the rest of the trip.

Things will start to crystallize once we have more certainty over when the van will arrive.  If we can get most or all of the 1,000 break-in miles on the van before we leave, then we could leave here as late as Friday the 31st of July and still keep our travel schedule intact.