On Tue, 19 Oct 1999, Stian Birkeland wrote: > Why was it necessary to set up Quality Assurance Centers in the States? To put the cars together again. :} All import car companies have quality assurance centers to straighten out things that may have gotten knocked loose during shipping, perform upgrades that were introduced while the cars were in transit, that sort of thing. In the case of DMC, the first cars to come out of the factory were in very rough shape. Not all the machines were broken in and many of the employees were not fully trained yet. Because of that, the QA centers rebuilt many of the early cars to arrive in the US. Once the factory got up to speed, the QA centers assumed the more traditional QA-center role, but were still necessary for that purpose as well as distribution centers.