mr_digital_uk

Folks,

We are ever so close now to the day when Mazda will load a RORO car carrier with our vehicles in Hiroshima.

I have tried ever so hard to work out how we can identify the vessel that will carry our cars, but so far to no avail.

Any ideas how we can find this out and then how we can track the ship as it makes it's way towards the UK?

It would, after all, give us something positive to talk about.

Cheers,

Andy

Titanium Grey

I found a roro shipping schedule PDF on one of the websites of the most likely candidate, NYK Lines. However this was in Japanese and wouldn't display in my Acrobat reader.
I can get a copy and post it if someone would like to try to display it and then decipher it.

My previous post with all the information I found is Here.

RX-Late

Does anyone know:

1. How many cars will fit on one of the container ships?
2. How many RX8 are coming on the first boat?
3. How long does the boat trip take?

Ta.

Titanium Grey

1. Some of the large ships can carry ovr 5,000 cars over 14 decks!

2. We think around 1,000 but no one knows for sure.

3. 25 days is the average voyage, via the Suez canal and the Med.

RX-Late

Okay so assuming a November delivery Mazda should be able to tell us a month before they arrive whose car in on board.

Titanium Grey

They should be able to tell us as soon as the boat leaves port (should have happened almost a week ago). They must have an inventory of what's on the ship. There will probably be at least two weeks of customs, tests and checks to go through before the cars are shipped to dealers. Maybe even longer, although not as long as the Americans had to put up with.

I'm starting to think that they havent allocated produced cars to oderers yet and will only do this when the cars are on the boat.
So they can maximise the matching of their stock to customers.

RX-Late

Hummm - if that turns out to be true then the first deliveries will not/may not reflect the order in which orders were placed.

Titanium Grey

The cars were apparently built based on customer orders but there are bound to have been changes to orderd spec and cancellations. These will probably mess things up a little but not too much, I hope.

RobDickinson

Any changes to spec once the order is 'Accepted' will probably result in delay.

So if you orderd a tit + leather and changed your mind, you get bumped back.

I assume there will then be a 'spare' tit+leather on that first ship?

Titanium Grey

Not me. I want my leather!

Just pointing out there now may be spare cars that need to be reallocated. The longer they can hold off on the reallocation process the less times they will have to do it, as more spec changes and cancellations by orderers are inevitable.

mr_digital_uk

For what it's worth ... and reading between the lines ... I don't think our cars have left port yet; Mazda intimated as much in the letters to us. As far as I can tell there are sailings today and next Tuesday, so one of those could be ours (hopefully)

MarkW

A boat has left, as Mazda have stated this in the email today.

If people think the journey is around 25 days they should be docking around the end of the month.

Maybe these boats have had their specific power output reduced to meet the new international shipping emission laws and no one has told us, so it will take 30 days instead of 25

RX-Late

Maybe the boat only contains the dealers demo cars. Will Mazda ever really tell us what is happening?

mr_digital_uk

I think the NYK normal schedule is 31 days not 25