General Motors is more than halfway through shipping recently assembled pickups that it had parked because of shortage of semiconductor chips, a leading executive at the automaker said on Friday.
“We’ve made great progress,” Steve Carlisle, GM’s North American chief executive said at the Reuters Events Automotive Summit. “We’re a bit better than halfway through that at the moment and our target would be to clear out our ’21 model years by the end of the year. We’ll have a bit of a tail of ’22 model years into the new year but not for too long.”
To expedite transportation of recently built vehicles to dealers, Carlisle said the automaker purchased a number of car haulers to provide them from factories or distribution centers. The automaker has also permitted dealers to pick the vehicles up themselves in some locations.
Carlisle said new vehicle inventories have shrunk to below 20 days in the United States because of the supply chain disruptions, but the automaker wants to get that back up to 30 to 45 days with some getting to 60 days depending on the product line.
The automaker sees sales of gasoline-powered automobiles being steady over the decade and real growth opportunity in electric vehicles and software, with one not undermining the other, Carlisle said.
The chip shortage, which has hit automakers worldwide, emerges from a confluence of factors as automakers, which closed plants for two months during the coronavirus pandemic last year, rival against the sprawling consumer electronics industry for chip supplies. A factory fire suffered by Japanese chipmaker Renesas this year is also cited as a reason behind the chip shortage.
