General Motors has been forced to park thousands of cars every day and idle the assembly of less-popular models due to the scarcity of semiconductor chips.
Each vehicle is nearly complete but still lacking the semiconductor chips, which the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a critically short supply of around the globe.
“Right now we have a global supply chain in crisis,” professor of supply chain practice at Syracuse University Patrick Penfield told Popular Science. “We’ve just never, ever seen anything of this magnitude impact us before.”
GM is parking approximately 1,000 newly built trucks and SUVs at Texas’ Arlington Assembly. The vehicles remain stationary and stocked in big lot spaces located between Forth Worth and Dallas, according to CarBuzz.
Production of less-popular GM models, such as the Chevy Malibu, have been halted to meet production demands for more-popular models like the Silverado 1500 and Silverado HD.
In the last quarter of 2020, GM announced its investment in its Spring Hill, Tennessee, assembly plant for electric vehicles and five more Michigan plants, including Flint assembly for crossover and full-size pickup production. Currently, GM is not the only automotive company facing the crisis of the massive lack of supply of semiconductor chips. Among them is Nissan, who intends to produce 500,000 fewer vehicles due to the chip supply shortage.
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