Charles K. Stevens - General Motors Co.
Analyst · Ryan Brinkman with JPMorgan
Yeah. Specific to this truck, again, start at a high level, Ryan, this is an all-new architecture. Our last three generations of truck were fundamentally off the same architecture, with changes in sheet metal. So, this is an absolute all-new architecture which requires all new body shops. So, when we take downtime at certain facilities, it's because we're either converting or constructing new body shops to facilitate this launch, and we've been opportunistic around doing that around holiday periods so that you can get extra time to make these transitions without a full impact on downtime. So, again, taking advantage of Christmas time and leading into Q1, we've taken that opportunity with this transition. As I said back in January, we expect the unmitigated impact of launch and volume for the next-generation truck in 2018 to be about 130,000 units. We've tried to leg that in over the 2017/2018 timeframe by taking, again, opportunistic downtime to do the work that we needed to do at the facilities. In addition, we will be launching this year, and we're in process right now, of building what we call the Oshawa Shuttle, where we're taking bodies from Fort Wayne through the old body shop, shipping those to Canada and painting and assembling trucks there, which will fill about half of that gap. So, that's a mitigating action to take, a pretty significant headwind of 130,000 units, in essence, mitigate half of it and we're confident that that's going to turn out to be a benefit for us in 2018. Again, this is a massive level of change in our four facilities with an all-new architecture, and we're going to have to manage this and execute this flawlessly over the next couple of years, and so far, so good.