• These trains were originally ordered in December 2000, for delivery from March 2003 to July 2005.
  
• The first unit was delivered to Denmark in autumn 2003, but only a second followed by the time the entire batch was supposed to have been delivered, and even their testing wasn't completed as they had several problems.
  
• AnsaldoBreda was first forced to pay compensation in November 2005.
  
• The first commercial run was in June 2007, with a single unit and as local train, but commercial runs ended after exhaust problems.
  
• DSB first threatened to cancel the contract in its June 2008 ultimatum, demanding 15 functional sets within 12 months – at the time, they had 5 sets.
  
• Commercial runs were started again in August 2008 (five years delay).
  
• In May 2009, barely meeting the 15-functional-sets ultimatum from a yeare earlier, AnsaldoBreda again agreed to pay compensation, adding up to half of the original contract price(!). Also, a a new delivery schedule lasting until 2012 was agreed. By the new schedule, DSB was supposed to have 44 trains by the end of 2010, and 53 by the end of March.
  
• At the time AnsaloBreda was still doing development work (!), making all deliveries unique and fault-prone.
  
• DSB was in a bind over a cancellation of the program because government plans foresee mainline electrification from around 2020: if they dumped the IC4s and issued a big new diesel mutliple unit order for delivery in the middle of the 2010s, those trains would not have been amortised by the time DSB would have to buy new electric multiple units to replace them.

As noted before, I think this mess is a cascading result of AnsaldoBreda focusing its efforts on getting an also problematic electric locomotive delivered to Italian State Railways; and this mess also resulted in the delay of deliveries of Dutch-Belgian high-speed trains.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}