Well, you must have heard a lot about the astonishingly long waiting periods on a lot of cars these days. While it has been true in the industry with a new product, it was not as common as it is this year. Even some of the regular products have long waiting times. A ton of people have booked their cars and are waiting for the deliveries to commence. But they are not able to receive their new vehicles quick enough. There are plenty of reasons for this and we shall try to go through those reasons one by one.
Also read: Car sales report for January 2021 – Winners and Losers!
Shortage of semi-conductors
Just like everywhere else in the world, the shortage of semi-conductor due to breakage of supply has caused a massive disruption in manufacturing of the automobiles. The reason for this is that all the modern cars come with a lot of electrical circuits and components to operate various functions in a car. The mechatronics involved in cars these days have gone up tremendously. Electrical communication plays the most important role in vehicles. This can be understood from a lot of examples, ranging from, sensor data for speed, RPM, angle of steering, throttle angle for automatic transmissions. On the safety aspects, the electronic components play an even more significant role. For instance, ABS (Anti-lock Braking System) and EBD (Electronic Brake-force Distribution) contribute to the optimum braking efficiency of a vehicle by looking at which tyre has what speed.
Deployment of Airbags in fatal accidents, preventing a car from rolling down the hill (Hill-start Assist), Roll-over Mitigation, Automatic Emergency Braking System and a ton of ADAS (Advanced Driving Assistance System) functions, all require electronic communication to automate the desired action to assist the driver or avoid injuries during accidents. The semi-conductors are generally manufactured in China and Taiwan and because of the pandemic, the production of the semi-conductors has been hampered. Therefore, it will take some time for things to get back on track.
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High demand
The Indian automobile industry is the fifth-largest car market in the world. The demand for new vehicles has been rising constantly for the past few years. The growth of the Indian automobile market has been solid and the trend will keep on continuing. The Vehicle Scrappage Policy will also boost the sales of new vehicles because the government will provide incentives to get rid of your old vehicles and buying new ones. More and more people are first-time buyers in our country and this will keep on happening for as long as India is a developing nation. With a lot of launches delayed last year due to the pandemic and people postponing their purchases, this year will see strong demand for new automobiles. The new launches will also see at least a very strong demand in the initial months. Al this has and will contribute to the delay in delivery times of your vehicles. A lot of car manufacturers are ramping up the production of various products to meet out the demand.
Also read: Maruti Suzuki NEXA reaches 13 lakh sales milestone – Third largest in India!
Production affected due to the pandemic
Like we mentioned earlier, a lot of the manufacturing facilities have not been able to work to full capacity. This is also valid for the vehicle components which have to be imported because the manufacturing has been stopped or minimized during the covid era. Now, the production facilities around the globe are getting back to their full capacity but that meant that there are a lot of backlogs from the times when production was completely disrupted. The coming months seem to provide some relief from the production standpoint.
Supply chain disruption
Lastly, the pandemic hampered the delivery of the manufactured cars to the customers because of many challenges in the supply chain. Due to the lockdown and other restrictions in the movement of goods across the country, the delivery times of the vehicles were adversely affected during the pandemic. It also meant that the raw material supply to the production facilities was also restricted. It has started to get a lot better now but it did mean that a lot of orders and deliveries remained pending for a long time. Hoping to recover from the pandemic fully, this issue will also likely be resolved now. The deliveries of manufactured cars, as well as raw materials, will return to normal in the coming months.
