EPIC Fail! Carrera Bass Pro set story

[Dave Kennedy]

Yup, I dish the dirt on the failure in production of the Carrera Bass Pro set. As I remember it, HALF the cars in the total production run of sets were wrong. Yup, about 1500 sets were made and we got back at least 700 twin packs from the sets!

[dinglebery]

Funny story! Thanks again for sharing this behind the scenes intel!

[Brad_T]

Great story to share about manufacturing issues. The integrity of a company is evident in how they deal with a problem, and that the consumer is inconvenienced as little as possible. Good for Carrera.

[4424ever]

If I knew where that office was I’d be watching the dump

[slothead]

Would it have been possible to have small opaque stickers printed to go over the names on the windshield? The stickers could have the correct name on them or just cover the wrong name.

[lance]

i agree. instead of the waste of postage and, cars. A sticker over the name on the window.
On the cars they recieved back, black out the name and discount the cars and sell as club sets or cars for parts.

[Dave Kennedy]

You can't make a temporary fix for something like this for a vendor like that. You have to either fix it or scrap them. With a mass market account like that you have to deal with it in a real way, a sticker wasn't an option.

[slothead]

Yes, I understand that. I worked at IBM back in the 80's and know corporate decisions are often all or nothing, while common folk look for degrees of fixes. A terrible waste of otherwise good cars and parts. I would have paid $20 a chassis for those.

[Zcarfan]

I was lucky, my set had the cars set correctly.

[REL13]

Dave, That was a good story. I remember when that happened. Why didn't the company just switch the windows.

[Dave Kennedy]

You can't rework nearly 1500 cars with only like 3 people in time for this to make any sense at all.

[dinglebery]

If it took 5 minutes per car = 125 hours to replace the windows. At 10 hours a day it'll take nearly 12.5 days. Now lets be realistic and say it's closer to 10 minutes per car total - 25 days to have all 1500 windows replaced.

[lance]

on carrera cars, the windows are held in by melting tabs from the body. one has to scrape or remove the melted plastic holding the window and remove. switch the window and then glue or melt the window tab to reattach. as we can see, that big business and their decisions dont always make sense or cents$

[Fathead59]

Good story Dave . Now , what I would like to know is , why didn't they sell the cars , at a discount , could have at least gotten some of the money back . And all the NASCAR guys in the slot car community would have a novelty car with story to go with it . Something out of nothing so to speak . That is instead of trashing them

[Fathead59]

With how you put that I will agree you , it is all with licensing . And who gets paid what for the copy right

[Dave Kennedy]

Nascar agreed to allow Bass Pro to allow us to make the sets that Bass Pro sold directly. Was Nascar paid by Bass Pro, I doubt it. I don't know that we had to pay Nascar because we, technically, weren't doing the license by selling the products ourselves because ALL the sets were sold ONLY by Bass Pro. Carrera never had any of the sets in their possession to sell so I believe that this was just done by Bass Pro (as a major sponsor) telling Nascar that they were contracting with Carrera to make the set. It was their product, with the Carrera name on it. There's a nuance of difference but in this case it means everything. I hope I've explained it clearly.

[Fathead59]

Thanks Dave