How many cars a manufacturer can sell currently depends heavily on how well they master the global chip crisis. Tesla is setting a delivery record.
While the auto industry is groaning under global chip bottlenecks, Tesla has set a delivery record. The US electric car maker brought a good 241,300 vehicles to customers worldwide in the third quarter, a good 53 percent more than a year earlier.
At the same time, Tesla also referred to the challenges posed by the shortage of chips. The Elon Musk-led group also had delivery delays and production breaks.
Toyota drives away GM
However, the US auto sales figures presented over the weekend show how hard some other manufacturers were hit by the chip shortage. For example, at the largest US auto company General Motors, sales in the home market fell by almost a third to just under 447,000 vehicles, as the group announced on Friday. Toyota, on the other hand, was even able to grow slightly and is well ahead of long-term market leader GM after the first nine months of the year.
At the Japanese industry giant, US sales increased by 1.4 percent to a good 566,000 vehicles in the third quarter. After three quarters, Toyota now has just under 1.858 million vehicles – and GM is 1.777 million.
Chip shortages are slowing US auto sales
Due to the shortage of chips, various manufacturers had to suspend production in recent months or were unable to complete vehicles. GM specifically pointed to bottlenecks in semiconductor production in Malaysia, but the situation is improving.
According to estimates by management consultants, the loss of production in the automotive industry due to the acute shortage of electronic components is increasing overall. “We assume that ten to eleven million vehicles cannot be built this year,” said Albert Waas, partner at the management consultancy Boston Consulting, of “Welt am Sonntag”.
According to a “Spiegel” report, the consulting firm PwC also expects that up to eleven million fewer cars will be produced and sold in 2021 than in the previous year. “The problems have worsened in the third quarter and will continue well into next year,” said the head of the automotive division at PwC, Felix Kuhnert, the magazine.
Only recently, the consulting firm Alix Partners had estimated that due to a lack of chips, the auto industry will miss out on revenues of a good 210 billion dollars (179 billion euros) this year.
The automotive industry is particularly hard hit by the semiconductor bottlenecks. One reason is that doing business with it is less lucrative for chip companies than selling to large electronics companies because of the relatively low number of units. At the beginning of the pandemic, many car manufacturers also had their own slump in demand – as a result, they canceled quantities that had already been promised by semiconductor companies. Now that the auto business is doing better, those chips are missing.
One of the reasons for the shortage of semiconductors was the increased demand for notebooks and other electronic products during the Corona crisis. But in general, every industry needs more and more chips. To make matters worse, chip manufacturers had reduced their capacities for some types of semiconductors in the past few years in view of the initially weak demand and are now unable to replenish them quickly.
Volkswagen, Porsche, BMW
The US sales of German automakers developed differently in the past quarter. At Volkswagen, the number of vehicles sold fell by 8 percent to 79,321. The sports car subsidiary Porsche sold 15,289 cars, 1.7 percent fewer.
In contrast, BMW increased its sales in the USA by 8.7 percent to 75,619 vehicles. Since the beginning of the year, the group has sold 243,613 cars, even 35.4 percent more than in the first nine months of 2020. Volkswagen has posted an increase of 29.9 percent to 51,615 cars since the beginning of the year.
Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
