90 Years Of Reign Hits A Roadblock, General Motors’ Chip Shortage Crisis

A critical time for General Motors (GM) at the moment, as the largest automotive manufacturer in the United States struggles with production issues caused by the lack of semiconductor chips.

Just imagine, after dominating the world’s automotive market for so long, GM is now facing the problem of declining sales for the first time in 90 years.

Although GM is striving to complete productions of electric vehicles (EV) including new models and EV platforms, it is however unfortunate that their sales have reportedly declined drastically recently.

For your information, GM has been the largest car seller in the US since 1931 and managed to compete with some of its competitors such as Ford Motor Co.

However, GM is said to be affected further due to the chip crisis but starting next week, most of GM's car assembly plants located in North America will start operating as usual.

GM claimed its third-quarter sales fell nearly 33 percent, which is about 446,997 vehicles. It was the worst quarterly sale in more than 10 years.

General Motors’ executive vice president and General Motors North America’s president, Steve Carlisle commented, “Semiconductor supply disruptions have affected the third quarter sales but vehicle delivery operations are improving. Looking at the fourth quarter, vehicle flow is more stable and it will be handed over to distributors as we have resumed production at the assembly plant. We hope operating production will be more stable by autumn."

Meanwhile, despite the decline in GM’s sales, Japan's largest carmaker, Toyota Motor Corp, recorded exceptional sales, beating GM's sales in the first nine months of this year.

Speaking of which, during the 9-month period, Toyota reportedly managed to sell 1.86 million vehicles compared to GM's 1.78 million.

This means that Toyota managed to sell more than 80,000 units compared to GM, causing it to overtake General Motors.

Typically, chips are used in parts of a car’s infotainment system but due to the Covid-19 pandemic, demands for it have increased tremendously.

That’s not all, the global chip shortages have also affected various industries, including mobile phones, computers, cars and other fields.

Evidently, this is because people now work from home and are heavily dependent on smartphones and many other electronics.