THE new Civic will arrive in dealerships next February, a month later than planned after production at Honda's Swindon factory has been delayed due to parts shortages from flood-ravaged Thailand.
Honda UK managing director Dave Hodgetts, speaking at the launch of the latest Civic, said the components’ suppliers in Thailand had been particularly badly affected.
Nearly 200 assorted part types were now unavailable or in short supply.
He said: “Where some parts are common to a number of models and made in different locations we may be able to increase orders but in other cases of solus suppliers in Thailand we will have to wait until those particular parts are back in production.
“We are looking at all possibilities and I understand divers have been sent into some places to recover tooling so it can be relocated to other parts of the country and production restarted.”
There is a month’s supply of parts in the UK and on a container ship but this will be the last regular shipment for some time, so the factory at Swindon has put the new Civic onto a three-day week production cycle to extend manufacturing and reduce the pressure on the parts stock.
Honda’s 3,000 Swindon workers also assemble Jazz and CR-V models and these have also been affected by the parts shortages.
“This has been a challenging year for Honda,” added Mr Hodgetts. “We had the terrible tsunami in Japan in March and were forced to stop building cars and were just getting over this in September and beginning to get ready for production of this new Civic when we were hit by the affects of the flooding in Thailand.”
Honda’s plants in the USA and other parts of the world will also be affected by the current flooding to greater or lesser extent depending on what they sourced from the area.
Asked if he believed Honda would now be looking at their suppliers, Mr Hodgetts added: “You cannot simply turn to someone else and ask them to make a part from scratch but I think we will be looking at the locations of some suppliers to consider if they are likely to be affected by such natural disasters and if so they will be encouraged to relocate.”