Dealers and automakers across the industry continue to cope with scarce inventory. Retail inventory, which includes vehicles on dealership lots and vehicles in transit, has hovered around 850,000 for three months, said Tyson Jominy, vice president of data and analytics at J.D. Power. That compares with more than 3 million under normal circumstances in recent years.
The chip shortage is only one of many factors making it hard for dealers and customers to get the vehicles they want, Jominy said.
“It’s everything. It’s paint resin. It’s tires. It’s wiring harnesses. It’s headlights. It’s radios,” he said. “If it was one thing, we could probably have a solution. But the reality is it’s multilayered supply and logistical challenges that make it extraordinarily difficult to resolve quickly.”
Dealers often are invoiced for vehicles before they leave the assembly plant. In some states, they can officially sell a vehicle to a customer as soon as they receive its invoice and certificate of origin. Before the pandemic, dealers could be confident that the vehicle would arrive a week or two after being invoiced.
The crisis has left dealers unable to answer many customers’ questions about when their vehicles will show up.
“Sometimes you get [the vehicles] in three months, and sometimes you get them in seven,” the Minnesota Chevy dealer said. “You report them, and by the time the thing comes in, you have made three payments on it, all the trials for OnStar and XM are expired and the [customer] calls you 9,000 times wondering where his vehicle is.”
