Mercedes Predicts Shortage Of Chips To Disrupt Car Production Until Mid-2022

Many devices in cars now have to use chips. (photo: mercedes-benz)

JAKARTA - Daimler's Chief Technology Officer, Markus Schaefer, said the luxury carmaker expects the supply of chips, especially for cars, to remain scarce throughout 2022, especially in the first half of this year.

This will certainly have a very big impact on the automotive industry, considering that the chip is an important part of car equipment. Starting from regulating the combustion system, security system, to system entertainment devices such as audio-video in the car.

"Chip scarcity will also accompany us in 2022, especially in the first half," Schaefer told the media in a press statement also quoted by Reuters.

This makes the German car factory unable to increase its car production capacity. It is even possible that production will decline if the problem of scarcity of chips for cars cannot be overcome.

"We don't expect a significant increase in production capacity in the first half of the year ... this will hardly happen in a full year," he said.

Daimler, which will soon be renamed Mercedes-Benz, produced 23.9% fewer cars in October 2021 than the previous year. It even dropped 21.8% less last November.

This, reflecting the decline in production as automakers around the world are also struggling to get enough chips to meet demand.

But this is not the case for Tesla, which is known to have produced their own car chips. This condition makes the car factory owned by Elon Musk continue to increase production and delivery of cars to its customers in the midst of difficulties faced by Mercedes-Benz et al.