

| Subject: | Re: SA grill availability |
| From: | John Bange |
| Date: | Tue, 24 Oct 2006 21:16:05 -0700 |
> Rumor has it that it's been discontinued Well, according to Groschi who used to do the SA parts thing (he's given up the internet parts business entirely, it seems-- his site just links to vw-winkler.de now!), South Africa has parts supply regulations similar to the US, where the manufacturer has to supply replacement parts for 10 years after the end of a vehicle's production run. Because of that, the parts should continue to be available at least until 2013-- but unfortunately the regulations don't say that VWSA has to procure the parts in a timely manner! They seem to let backorders pile up, then run off various parts in infuriatingly small runs at 6-12 month intervals to satisfy the "legitimate" domestic demand, and then let the backorders pile up again. Subsequently, unless you live there and can get to the local dealership right when they let you know the parts are in, chances are you won't find anything in stock. Normally, the quantities of parts they run off would be plenty for any ORDINARY out-of-production vehicle, but the demand for the SA Vanagon parts in Europe and the US is just insane, so any surplus "high demand" parts run out in a matter of weeks or days. I think when it got to the point where Groschi was facing the prospect of having to BRIBE a factory worker just to get the brake caliper saddles for the brake kit (running the risk of him saying "money? what money?"), that's when he threw in the towel. So yeah, we can probably look forward to the grill (and other SA parts) showing up sporadically for another 6 years or so. This is, of course, all third hand hearsay I got through my father who's talked to Groschi several times over the last year, with details possibly translated from German to English a couple times and maybe even garbled by Skype a bit on top of it, so I can't guarantee the perfect accuracy of all of it... -- John Bange '90 Vanagon - "Geldsauger"
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