Cars get stuck at US garages for weeks due to spare-parts shortage

The world’s supply chain woes are bearing down on US auto garages. The challenge of finding spare parts as mundane as oil filters or carpeting has forced repair shops to hoard inventory, find workarounds andplead with customers for patience until a shipment comes in. Typicaldelays ofa day or two have stretched into weeks in some cases, shop owners say.

It’s a self-feeding loop. A global semiconductor shortagehas cutthe production of new vehicles, leading to a surge in demand and prices of used cars and forcingpeople tokeep their old oneslonger. In turn, these vehiclesneed repairs, which are now increasingly being draggedby supply-chain snarls.

In the Seattle suburbs, garage owner Bryan Kelley waited on parts for 60 to 90 days on two separate occasionswhilefixing pick-up trucks. One of theparts, a crankshaft position sensor, used to take a half hour to get from the distribution center, said Kelley, owner of Valley Automotive Repair and Electric. The wait gotso long that the customerwas ready to give up on his Dodge Ram 1500, hesaid.

“He went as far as to say, ‘I’m going to tow it and buy another truck,’" said Kelley, who’s alsochairman of the Automotive Service Association Northwest trade group. “It got compounded when he found he couldn’t just go down and buy one."

The $300 billion auto-partsand repair industry is facingwidespreadoperational challenges, from spikes in the price of steel and other materials toworkforce shortages and — like everyone else — delays getting goods unloaded at U.S. seaports, said Paul McCarthy, chief executive of the Automotive Aftermarket Suppliers Association.

No garage is being spared, whether franchise dealers who get their parts from the major automakers,independent warehouses, or small corner garages, McCarthy said.

“This is the most difficult supply-chain environment that I have ever seen,"AutoZone Inc. Chief Executive Officer William Rhodessaid in a September earnings call. AutoZone is running “the lowest level of in-stock that I can ever remember," said Rhodes, who started his career at theMemphis, Tennessee-based auto-parts retail giant in the 1990s and has been CEO since 2005.

For now,mechanics on the front lines are having to get creativewhile keeping car ownerscalm as they break the bad news. It helps when so many of these clients haveexperiencedpandemic-era shortages of all sorts of productsin the past year and a half.

In the Philadelphia suburbs, Lisa Matlock’s Nissan Sentra got flooded when Hurricane Ida pummeled the Northeast in early September, leaving the interior a soggy and reeking mess. “I can’t begin to tell you what the smell was like," Matlock said.

Unable to find replacement carpeting, the mechanics at Colket Technical Services in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, did the next best thing by ripping out the existing carpet, having it professionally cleaned and putting it back in.

Matlock was understanding when shop owner Ross Colket explained he couldn’t find carpeting anywhere. As a convenience-store worker, she can’t even find plastic containers for her shop’s grab-and-go sandwiches lately. “I wasn't surprised or flustered that Ross was having trouble finding carpet," Matlock said.

Hoarding has become a common practice for particularly sought-after items. “Oil filters are becoming harder to get, so when I buy them, I buy them in as big of quantities I can get," said River Road Auto Service manager Danny Tomasian in Bethesda, Maryland.

The auto repair delays seem particularly acute in the U.S.because spare parts produced in Asia get tangled in the global shipping clog andcargo jams at seaports.

Xu Haidong, a vice chief engineer at the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, said production and supply of parts aresufficient in his country. In Japan,some electronic parts are becoming harder to find, such as navigation systems, but other parts are readily available,saidHiroshi Arai, secretary generalof the Japan Autoparts Wholesales Association.

For now, the U.S. aftermarket parts industry is bracing for shortages possibly into next year, said McCarthy of the suppliers association. Colket, the Philadelphia-area garage owner, is taking it in stride. He even has a nickname for the persistent delays: “We lovingly refer to it as intergalactic backorder."