The acute shortage of computer chips in vehicle construction only leads to production and delivery delays, but also affects actually built vehicles: German car manufacturers currently only deliver unfinished vehicles and thus cause displeasure among customers and dealers.
“We now have restrictions almost everywhere,” said Andreas Henkel, sales manager at the Mercedes dealership Felix Kloz in Stuttgart, the Automobilwoche. Sometimes the electric tailgate is missing, sometimes the light function is limited. The vehicles would then be improved at the manufacturer’s expense. Nevertheless, the sales figures have fallen massively.
Like Mercedes, BMW also has delivery problems. Christian Rönsch, managing director of the Schleswig-Holstein BMW dealer May & Olde, reported to the industry and business newspaper that vehicles are delivered without the corresponding extras. These would then have to be retrofitted on site. Rönsch says of the tense market situation: “We cannot plan that, so it is correspondingly difficult in terms of communication. We often have to put off the customer and re-order the order. “
BMW confirmed to Automobilwoche that some cars are not being completed in production. At the same time, the company emphasized its flexibility for quick retrofitting.
At times, Audi handed over new vehicles to the customer with only one key instead of two. The bottleneck has now been resolved, said a spokeswoman.
Delivery times of over a year for end customers are the order of the day for almost all models. Many dealers would no longer get any vehicles at all. The industry association VDA does not expect the production situation to ease until the second half of 2022.