CHARLOTTE – If you’ve been in the market for a new vehicle, chances are you can’t find new vehicles to buy. But what if I told you that the overwhelming majority of new vehicle shortages isn’t a production issue? In fact, Ford has tens of thousands of F-Series pickups fully assembled and ready to roll, minus one important part…
Computers.
The majority of car shortages have been a byproduct of the global semiconductor shortage, which famously made the new Playstation 5 and computer graphics cards almost impossible to find last Black Friday.
The shortage of semiconductors has lasted so long due to a multitude of issues. Electronics sales soared last year, likely due to both people and companies buying new computers to work from home with, meaning chip consumption was up for most of 2020. Also, Fortune reports that the Texas cold snap and Taiwan droughts earlier this year as well as a fire in a Renesas factory in Japan, all three places which are major chip manufactures, caused shortages in production. Higher demand due to work from home and lower supply due to multiple natural disasters ultimately resulted in the shortage.
This of course prevents most modern cars from rolling off the lot complete. Even the most basic of base-model cars require some form of computer chip.
Fortunately, this is more of a temporary setback more than anything. While it may be 2022 before car sales are back to normal, but you can expect many new cars to be back on lots again soon.
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