The car market is starting to get hit harder by the shortage of semiconductors. Every day, new information appears about important producers that interrupt production. Volkswagen could be among those who suffer the most.
Volkswagen produced only 300,000 vehicles this year at its main plant in Wolfsburg. Although it may seem fabulous at first glance, the reality is much sadder. It has not produced so few cars since 1958, less than a decade after World War II.
Volkswagen is facing a disaster
To better understand what 300,000 vehicles means to a titanium like Volkswagen, it is worth noting that the average number of vehicles per year in the decade before the pandemic was 780,000 cars per year. In 2018, optimism was so high among the giant’s bosses that they announced that they want to increase production to one million a year.
The problems facing Volkswagen are not so much related to the pandemic or the illness of the workers, but to the supply of semiconductors, chips and various electronic components. As a result, in 2020, production was almost 500,000 vehicles. By the end of this year, production will be significantly lower than that.
Volkswagen previously acknowledged its disaster in a statement and insisted that they will have a production deficit of hundreds of thousands of vehicles due to the lack of semiconductors. The announcement did not come as a shock, given that the same problems are facing car manufacturers around the world and that, according to the company, will last until 2022, if not later.
About a week ago, a spokesman for the VW Group said efforts were being made to increase the productivity of the Wolfsburg plant and to facilitate the transition to electric car production.
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