AMD's response to discontinuing some MoPar product
Many questioned if AMD was getting out of the Mopar game to focus more on their Ford and Chevrolet customers. We decided to reach out to Mike Gray from AMD and ask him about it directly in which he graciously explained everything.
Mike says, “We are expanding like the many in the industry. We just moved into our new 318,000 sq. ft. facility in Gainesville, GA to help us handle our additional growth plans. The items we are dropping are purely a business decision based on the fact that we are forced to run larger numbers of parts in each production run and many of these (very) slow moving parts were getting near the point of being re-run. We decided not to run them because the quantities would be giving us 3-10 years of stock on these items.”
“We are still developing hundreds of new tools and decided it made more sense to invest in the new items instead of items that we know from history will sit on the shelves for years. We are not destroying our tools and if the situation changes and demand increases, we can always run them again in the future. While we have expanded our Ford and GM lines recently, we are not giving up on Mopar and will be introducing new panels for 1966-1967 Plymouth B-Bodies and 1973-1974 Chargers in the near future. We are test fitting prototypes now.”
In closing, he said, “Please be assured AMD is not giving up on the old car market, just dropping unprofitable parts.” In essence, we do agree that the move is smart with discontinuing slow selling and doubled items. For example, they are discontinuing Challenger Rallye hoods with hood pin holes but not discontinuing the Rallye hoods in their entirety.
Thanks for posting this.
It answers a lot of questions that some of us were wondering about.
In a way, I don't blame them for discontinuing certain parts that they don't sell a lot of to warrant the space it takes up in a warehouse, labor to produce them, etc.
On the other hand, why not just do shorter runs of the product to keep up with the eventual demands?
Also, I don't buy the fact that discontinuing '70 and '71 Duster/Demon quarter panels is a great idea as well as totally discontinuing the '67 to '69 Barracuda quarters all together is wise.
However, they do have the statistics on what really sells and the volume of product going out the door, not us.
It is a business after all, and they have shareholders to answer to.
We aren't the only ones affected by the discontinuations, the '63 to '65 B-Body guys are hit hard and the '62 to '65 Chev Impala guys are hit hard as well.
I suppose we'll all have to endure, just like we did in the '90s, we had a good run with them making the AMD sheet metal parts available in the first place.
Just think of all the cars that have been saved because of them up to now.........
