Arteb Headlights / Taillights End-of-Life (?)

[454cid]

Can that second shipment be rerouted?

 

[1998_K1500_Sub]

Can that second shipment be rerouted?

That's crossed my mind. I haven't pursued it because...

Truth is, we have yet another buyer in Germany ("Buyer2") and, provided this shipment makes it to Buyer1, we'll consider having Buyer1 forward it to Buyer2.

I hope folks appreciate that this ain't like buying a clock radio on Amazon w/ "One-click buying" and "Amazon Prime - Same Day Delivery".

This can and sometimes does get much more involved.

 

[HotWheelsBurban]

That's crossed my mind. I haven't pursued it because...

Truth is, we have yet another buyer in Germany ("Buyer2") and, provided this shipment makes it to Buyer1, we'll consider having Buyer1 forward it to Buyer2.

I hope buyers appreciate that this ain't like buying a clock radio on Amazon w/ one-click buying and Amazon Prime. This can and sometimes does get much more involved.

I think many people in the US take for granted, how easy it is for us to get things shipped in the country. Probably half of the items I have sold online, are delivered a day earlier than expected by USPS; I usually use Priority Mail because it's a flat rate in their boxes and it's usually there in 2-3 days.
A couple of examples in my experience: the first Escalade cluster I sold, went to NE Texas. The buyer had it within 24 hours of me shipping it with FedEx. And I ordered a pair of headlamp bulbs from Rock Auto on Friday morning; I picked USPS ground advantage (fka First Class) because it was half as much as priority mail. The scheduled delivery was for today, but I got them Monday afternoon.

 

[Erik the Awful]

I thought about looking to see if these were available in Chile while I was there, but I never had the opportunity.

 

[1998_K1500_Sub]

I thought about looking to see if these were available in Chile while I was there, but I never had the opportunity.

I wonder how many GMT400s made it to Chile. Did you see any on the road?

Today the population of Chile is around 20M, Brazil around 210M, about 10x greater.

When looking for the Arteb headlights I sniffed around at other countries to find them, but Brazil is the elephant in the room in SA, and of course the home of Arteb, so "look no further". Farther north I considered Mexico, but their GMT400s were NA versions so no Arteb headlights there.

Oh yes, there were Arteb offices across the Americas and some in Europe, at least in 2019 when I first started looking. These days they're more limited in scope: Brazil, Uruguay and Chile.

https://www.arteb.com.br/onde-encontrar-arteb/#info

"Arteb" was founded by Artur Eberhardt

 

[Erik the Awful]

I wonder how many GMT400s made it to Chile. Did you see any on the road?

I don't remember seeing any, but I'd be surprised if there weren't any. There was a Dodge Dakota down the street from the church we were working at. One of the kids said it was his mom's truck. Got to see two Lada Nivas. There's an utter crapload of Chinese cars. Rode around town in a Toyota Hilux. Rode up into the mountains in a crew cab S10.

Three nights in a row some dude tore through town at 2 am with a straight-piped motorcycle, doing somewhere around 100 mph. Friday night around 1 am there was a full-on drag race in the street outside our hotel, and one of the cars had a very healthy sounding V8. They have a pretty strong car culture.

 

[HotWheelsBurban]

Chile is a very narrow, but long, country, hugging the West Coast of South America. Brazil is on the East Coast, but is freaking huge, with lots of undeveloped territory and rugged terrain.

 

[1998_K1500_Sub]

Headlights and Shipping - Challenges with Breakage:

As posted here earlier (see posts from @0xDEADBEEF), as well as in email conversations I've had with other buyers, we've had some breakage problems this year, worse then in prior years.

One recent buyer was greeted with this catastrophe (below), the worst we've seen.

Carlos and I are trying to understand the problem and make improvements, i.e., where are the vulnerabilities in our packaging and how can we guard against damage better.

As many of you may know, our packaging is ad hoc, and that’s because Arteb actually doesn’t package their headlights very well from the factory and we can't simply re-use. If anyone's ever purchased headlights from, e.g., TYC or APC, they’ve found those headlights come nicely ensconced in Styrofoam in a larger cardboard box. We don’t have that luxury; Arteb doesn't package them so nicely, so we have to do the best we can with what we’re given and what we can craft.