I Detroit har chipbristen gjort att staden har en kuslig brist på bilar

• Den värsta krisen för biltillverkare på 50 år har gjort att återförsäljarna inte har mycket att sälja när priserna skjuter i höjden för konsumenterna

DETROIT — Even Motor City is running short of cars these days.

Uthyrningsdiskarna på Detroits flygplats har fått slut på fordon den senaste tiden. Återförsäljare över hela staden rapporterar om knappa lager. Och köparna står inför månadslånga förseningar och skyhöga priser innan de kan lägga vantarna på en ny lastbil eller SUV.

The root problem is the same across the country — a Globalt underskott datorchips som har tvingat biltillverkarna att minska produktionen, vilket har lett till att Brist av nya och begagnade fordon. Men situationen känns särskilt stötande här, säger Detroiters.

“This is an auto manufacturing city. It shouldn’t be short of cars,” said Benyam Tesfasion, a cabdriver who has been busy shuttling travelers from the airport to pick up rental cars at locations 10 or 20 miles away. Another feature of his daily travels, he says, is driving past giant parking lots where automakers are stockpiling newly manufactured cars that are still awaiting a few final chips.

Detroit’s experience shows how thoroughly the nearly two-year-old Brist på halvledare has upended manufacturing — and foisted change on one of America’s most beloved consumer markets.

“It may be the biggest disruption we’ve seen since the 1970s and the fuel crisis,” said Matt Anderson, a transportation historian at the Henry Ford museum complex in Dearborn, referring to the tumultuous period that forced car companies to make more fuel-efficient vehicles.

The chip shortage “is the kind of thing that my successors I’m sure will be studying about in future years,” he added.
Gone are the days when buyers could drop in on a dealership and drive hem in a cherry-red convertible packed with their favorite features. Buying a car now means placing an order and waiting, sometimes for months, for the vehicle to arrive.

Also gone are the days when buyers could count on finding affordable wheels. The average U.S. list price for a new car has risen by 20 percent over the past two years, to $45,975, Enligt data provider Cox Automotive. The average for a used car has soared even more — by 40 percent, to $28,012.

Dessa toppar har varit en viktig faktor som drivit på inflationen, som slog Högsta på 40 år last month. A new car is increasingly “a luxury product for wealthy people,” said Charlie Chesbrough, senior economist at Cox Automotive. “For a $60,000- or $70,000-a-year household, you can’t afford a new car payment.”

Den globala bilindustrin producerade 8,2 miljoner färre fordon förra året än vad den skulle ha gjort utan chipbristen, enligt konsultföretaget AlixPartners. Och utsikterna för 2022 är fortfarande dystra, med biltillverkare projicerad att sälja bara 14,4 miljoner nya bilar i USA, en minskning från ungefär 17 miljoner 2019.

För ett år sedan hade Chevy-handlaren Paul Zimmermann cirka 700 nya bilar till salu på sin tomt strax utanför Detroit. I dag har han ett 25-tal.

Before, “if you were a customer, you could go look at a black Blazer or a silver Blazer. A white one. One without a sunroof. One with a sunroof. Now there’s hardly any,” said Zimmermann, who bought into the dealership in February 2020. “So there’s really no ability to shop in person.”

Det har förändrat allt om verksamheten hos återförsäljaren, som heter George Matick Chevrolet, som öppnade 1967 och rankas bland de största Chevy-utställningslokalerna efter kvadratmeter i USA.

Instead of dropping in to browse available vehicles, customers now place orders and wait, sometimes for several months, for their cars to arrive. Instead of working the showroom floor, sales staff now spend hours tracking their customers’ vehicles online, searching to see when they move out of production and become available for pickup.

On a recent Monday morning, the dealership had 183 cars in General Motors’s system that were nearly complete but still missing some final components. GM has coined a new term for those, Zimmermann said — “build shy” — because they are built shy of parts.

That’s changed the process of buying a car, which is often an emotional decision, Zimmermann said.

“There still is a lot of desire to have that tactile experience, you know, to touch, feel, smell, test drive,” he said. Customers ask, “Do you have one where I can just come and sit in it? Do you have one where I could just take it for a drive? Do you have one where I can just look at it?”

“In the absence of that,” he said, “I think that prevents some people from actually making the decision.”

The Detroit Pistons haven’t played at the Palace of Auburn Hills, a suburban arena, since 2017, and the building itself was demolished in 2020. But the parking lot on a recent Thursday was occupied by roughly 2,000 newly built GM trucks, which Chevy dealers said were missing chips. Security guards declined to comment.

Asked about the lot, David Barnas, a GM spokesman, pointed to the company’s recent announcement that the chip shortage and other disruptions had left it with 95,000 unfinished vehicles, which it aims to complete and sell to dealers by year-end. GM is holding the vehicles “in secure lots” near its factories, Barnas said. Over the long term, the company is racing to reduce the number of unique semiconductors it needs to ensure more reliable supplies, he added.

Liknande flottor av ofärdiga bilar finns gömda runt om i Detroit-området och utanför. En chef inom bilindustrin sa att han nyligen såg tusentals lastbilar parkerade runt en GM-fabrik i Silao, Mexiko. En före detta fabriksanställd berättade för honom att fordonen saknade chips.

In recent days, a lot behind a low-rise office park near Ford’s Dearborn headquarters held about 50 F-150 trucks with new-vehicle stickers attached. Security guards told The Washington Post that Ford owned the vehicles and that the lot, which can hold about 1,200 cars, had been full a few days earlier.

Ford spokesman Said Deep did not address questions about those trucks but said that “the entire industry has been managing global commodity issues and chip challenges for more than two years.”
“We continue to work to get our vehicles to our customers as fast as we can. … It remains fluid,” he said.

Problemet drabbar faktiskt de flesta biltillverkare. Tesla var det enda stora företaget som ökade försäljningen i USA på årsbasis under första halvåret 2022, medan Honda, Nissan och Volkswagen alla drabbades av minskningar på mer än 30 procent, till stor del på grund av leveransproblem. Enligt Cox Automotive.

The Brist are forcing Detroit-area buyers to compromise — even the ones who spend their days building cars for a living.

Ahyana Elliott, a factory worker at a Chrysler facility on the east side of Detroit, is in the market for a new vehicle. A car enthusiast since childhood, she already owns two Corvettes and a Camaro but wanted a “winter car” that can handle the Michigan snow, she said while browsing vehicles at Bob Maxey Ford, a downtown dealership near the Detroit River.

“My dad said, ‘Never have a reason you can’t get to work. If one car doesn’t start, have another,’ ” said Elliott, who spends her free time meeting up with fellow car aficionados in the local Corvette Club.

She had her sights on a new Ford Bronco but heard that the wait could be a year or more. So she’s now perusing used cars instead, but the high prices and rising interest rates are giving her sticker shock. There isn’t much choice on dealer lots, either.

“It’s horrible. There is nothing available,” she said.

2 stora chiptillverkare varnar för expansionsförseningar när subventionsräkningen tynar bort
På en Chevy-återförsäljare i förorten Auburn Hills gjorde sig Lauren Fisher redo att köpa ut leasingen på sin Equinox SUV i stället för att försöka få tag på en ny bil.

“With the car that I’m leasing right now, I got everything I want: leather seats, sunroof, heated seats and steering wheel,” she said. “If I were to go lease that again, I guarantee you I’m not going to find that. I’m going to have it built or it’s going to take forever to get it.”

Labor Brist Och bristen på andra material än chip stoppar också produktionen hos biltillverkare och leverantörer, men chip är det mest envisa problemet, säger branschchefer.
När en biltillverkare saknar en pusselbit kan den plötsligt stoppa produktionen och tvinga dussintals leverantörer att stänga sina fabriker, vilket gör alla frustrerade, säger Thomas Kowal, vd för Seraf, ett globalt konsultföretag med kontor i Troy, Michigan, som har varit upptagna med att ge råd till biltillverkare och leverantörer om hur de ska navigera i bristen.

An automaker might suddenly tell suppliers, “Hey, we don’t need to run production on Friday,” Kowal said. Then on Saturday it might demand that suppliers haul their workers in to churn out parts over the weekend. “It’s like it’s a yo-yo, constantly,” Kowal said.

Uber driver Ljupco Stefanovski, who used to work as a porter at a Chrysler plant, said he has seen this disruption when he drives Ford workers to and from their shifts at a factory in Wayne. Sometimes when he picks them up they say they’re being sent hem early. “There’s no chip, no work,” they tell him.

Some auto executives also bend his ear about chips. “A couple months ago I drive one guy — He worked for Ford, he worked for Kia, Hyundai,” recalled Stefanovski, who immigrated to the United States from North Macedonia. “He said, ‘Why we don’t build [chip] factories here, so we’re not going to have that problem?’ ”

Stefanovski is renting his car through an Uber program, because he can’t afford to buy one.

“You can’t even think to buy the car anymore — even the used car go 40 percent up,” he said. “These two, three years, everything is like backward. It’s not the same anymore.”