So far there is nothing on the GOV. recall site, nothing on Nortons own website and nothing on my dealers website or instagram account.. and they post daily. Assuming this recall is genuine, then I expect Norton have a solution and all new models off the production include the fix. Therefore new sales should not be impacted. As for me. I'm going to continue enjoying the bike until I hear otherwise from Norton directly or my dealer.
Factories and production systems are kinda my thing. This situation is potentially a very critical one.
We’re talking somewhere north of 300 bikes I believe.
Imagine that. Where to park them. Storing them. Moving them around. Doing so without damage. Without letting them sit out in the rain. Etc.
Then imagine the work. If it’s serious enough to necessitate a return to the factory, it is reasonable to assume it is a fairly intrusive repair process. Who is going to do this work on these 300+ bikes? Where? How? Using what QC processes?
The strain on resources, space, suppliers, management, QA, etc is what will impact their ability to simultaneously produce new motorcycles.
There is a huge risk here: Factories are designed and built, and standard processes are established, to produce their products on their production lines, in clean rooms, on dedicated equipment, in a standard way, etc all designed to maximise ‘right first time’ quality. Unless the bike is totally stripped down and the parts fed into the production lines (which is utterly impractical) then this can’t be done. So, these repairs are going to have to be conducted in a non-standard way, thus bypassing all of the above standard processes and equipment.
Given this, I hope you can visualise that the risk of introducing more failure modes during the repair and rebuild process is actually huge.
Therefore, IMO, the only way they can handle a job of this magnitude with the minimum risk is to temporarily halt production and divert ALL available resources to focus entirely on this recall.
There is already a lot of QC related negativity out there with new owners. Imagine what will happen if people’s bikes return from the factory riddled with assembly errors.
They REALLY need to get this right…
