This reminds me of what I went through back in ~2004 with a VW wiring harness. I had a product (a little toy that would give better control over the automatica

This reminds me of what I went through back in ~2004 with a VW wiring harness. I had a product (a little toy that would give better control over the automatically-deploying spoiler behavior on turbocharged New Beetles) that was built around one specific VW wiring harness. Apparently not many extras of the harnesses were manufactured, because after we bought ~15 of them (just enough for our first small run), the main distributor for parts in the US ran out of them. We got a few more by having some dealers do nationwide parts searches for us, but we had basically ended up buying out the entire country for this particular harness. We spent a ton of time trying to figure out how to work around this. We'd really hoped that we would be able to just construct the harnesses ourselves, but the connectors ended up being custom parts that the OEM was unwilling to sell to us. For a while we thought about giving people a discount on the product if they'd send their old harness to us, but we only had a couple left at the time, so that would really end up trashing our throughput. In the end, we just ended up waiting until their was new stock available, almost a year later. It really sucked to have a product that a bunch of people wanted, and not be able to ship it because of a couple of connectors! Anyhow, yeah ... I feel the author's pain.