[hinkley]

Isn't this a general problem with long manufacturing pipelines? Car manufacturers get smacked by economic turns all the time.

I bought a new car in '10 because the manufacturer gutted the feature set on the '11 model, once they figured out that the '08 recession was real. I much preferred the original feature set, so I had to buy at a way inconvenient time, about 6 months early, before the dealers ran out of stock.

We groused in the 80's about Sony for selling us cheaper, outdated versions of consumer electronics that they sold domestically. You can't recoup R&D costs when the exchange rate is as lopsided as the Yen was at the time.