If you were looking to buy a new Ford Bronco anytime soon, it’s best you look away. Thousands of the new SUVs are currently sitting outside Ford’s Michigan Assembly plant, all because of the global semiconductor shortage, according to Automotive News.
This lot has actually been home to stranded Broncos before when they had hardtop issues. It was then known as “Dirt Mountain.” A few months and a ton of snow later, the lot was re-christened “Ice Mountain.”
Thousands of these SUVs are covered in quite a bit of snow, and that has been an issue in the past for Broncos.
Videos began to surface on Bronco forums — especially Bronco6G — where a user went to the lot and filmed the unfortunate trucks.
Ford has remained mostly mum of Bronco production issues, Automotive News reports, but they were able to speak with the Ford dealer council chairman. According to Tim Hovik, the owner of San Tan Ford in Gilbert, Arizona, this is all due to the chip shortage, and Ford isn’t alone. It’s nothing new in the pandemic era of car production.
He described the entire situation as pretty much a never ending loop of pain:
“It’s Groundhog Day,” Hovik said. “One of these days we’ll wake up and it’s not going to be, but we’re not there yet.”
Last week, Ford CEO Jim Farley told Bloomberg in relation to another issue, “All we can do at this point is scale as fast as we can and break the constraints and communicate to (buyers) what’s realistic.”
Automotive News says buyers aren’t actually getting that support. Responses ranged from “they could be communicating better” to not getting any “transparency on Ford’s end. One buyer described Ford’s communication as “nonexistent.” These aren’t good responses from people willing to fork over tens of thousands of dollars on cars they have no timetable for receiving.
In a statement sent to Automotive News, Ford said there were a “few thousand” SUVs being held back at Ice Mountain, though they didn’t use that phrase. The company said their goal is to have all the trucks updated within the next 90 days, “pending chip availability.”
That last phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement. If chip availability doesn’t improve soon then the entire point is moot. That means buyers could be waiting even longer and as Michigan thaws, Ice Mountain could once again become Dirt Mountain.