Quote:
Originally Posted by Casotakar
I never understood how automakers got away with releasing a vehicle in the current calendar year and called it a model year in which the entire planet does not yet live and breathe. but do you really have a 2019 if it's 2018 AND then when calendar year 2019 rolls around they release a 2020 model....? lol nahhhhh. you don't. it's when it was built. 
someone explain the phenomena to me please.  |
Probably similar to a fiscal year, which usually starts in September. It makes sense for accounting purposes sometimes to not be tied to the calendar, for example when you're producing dozens of models and need to stagger development.
If my X3, built in November, were a 2017, and one built in January is suddenly a 2018, then the model year now tells us nothing about the car, as far as it's production run. As it stands now, we all know that 2018s had a certain feature set, available colors, factory tooling, etc.
The alternative would be to have all the factories retooled in December to align production to the calendar and release all new models in January, or to pull back the model year by one to indicate production start, which is just arbitrary and probably makes less sense given the majority of current 2018s are in fact produced in 2018.
I don't really know the answer, just speculating. I'm not coming up with a reason why they shouldn't do it the way they do now. 2017 or 2018, It's really just an arbitrary name for the production run, they could call it "bob".