John Lauderdale feels like throwing a party when a new work truck joins the fleet at Sunbelt Sealing.
“I get so happy when I find one,” said Lauderdale, vice president of Sunbelt Sealing, which provides paving and concrete maintenance services and seals joints underneath bridges to make sure water doesn’t infiltrate them.
“I’ve always enjoyed buying trucks, but I’ve never had the difficulty in locating what we need.”
Most years, Sunbelt Sealing would purchase three to five new work trucks to ensure its fleet stayed in good operating order, but now that’s not easy to do. “I’ve bought one new truck since the pandemic happened,” he said.
Like many businesses across the country, Sunbelt Sealing faces not only a shortage of work trucks but pays a higher price when one hits the lot at a dealership. At the same time, it is running into problems securing parts so the elder trucks in its fleet remain road worthy.
Before the pandemic, a white work truck – a ¾ ton truck with a regular cab, long bed and stripped down interior – cost about $35,000, Lauderdale said. The cost is now $45,000 for the same truck, he said.
Older trucks that once would have been rotated out of Sunbelt’s 30-truck fleet after seven or eight years of use are now repaired, even when it means a major fix such as a new transmission.
“We pulled a truck out of the bushes that needed a transmission that I wasn’t going to fix but because we couldn’t buy anything I ended up having to put a transmission on it at 150,000 miles,” Lauderdale said.
“I would have normally traded it in before it got to that. Getting the part is an issue. We were fortunate to find a transmission for one of our trucks but for another one we couldn’t find one.”
Any kind of truck, whether it’s a luxury ½-ton pickup equipped with all the bells and whistles or a ¾-ton work truck is hard to come by, said Jimmie Marshall, commercial manager at Fowler Buick GMC in Pearl.
“Ninety-five percent of the trucks that come in are pre-sold,” he said. “They’re already marked with someone’s name.”
When a load of trucks makes it to the dealership lot, the trucks are cleaned and then driven to customers who have already spoken for them, Marshall said.
“When you drive by a lot, you’re used to seeing a lot full of vehicles and now it may have four or five,” Marshall said. “We are still selling vehicles, but you don’t see them on our lot. Our business is still good.”
The shortage in computer chips, which operate safety features as well as a vehicle’s navigational system and heated seats, is said to account for numerous vehicle shortages, including work trucks, Marshall said. Work trucks, though not as luxurious as other models of trucks, do contain computer chips.
Paul Moak Jr. of Paul Moak Automotive in Jackson said chips are part of the struggle for dealerships to obtain vehicles but there’s more.
About 30 years ago, the automotive industry began adopting the “just in time” inventory system that aligns parts with when manufacturers need them, he said, so that a manufacturer doesn’t keep a large number of parts on site.
“When there is a hiccup in the supply line, that causes a lot of disruptions,” he said.
The global coronavirus pandemic caused automotive plants and parts suppliers to shut down or operate at a slower rate, he said.
“On a Honda, it takes three to five people working together to put the interior in a vehicle,” he said. “They work very close together but then new guidelines from the government said you’ve got to be 6 feet apart. They had to do something different in order to protect their workers and comply with what’s asked of them.”
The logistics of moving vehicles from manufacturing plants to lots has also been problematic because of factors ranging from a shortage of truck drivers because of the coronavirus to overseas shipping delays, he said.
The cold weather that hit Texas in February 2021 wreaked havoc at petroleum plants, some of which manufacture specialty plastic used to make interior panels on vehicles, he said.
“A large number of things are affecting the whole system,” Moak said.
No vehicle manufacturer is pleased with its ability to build and deliver vehicles, said Moak, who has been in the automobile industry since 1971, although his son-in-law, John Scarbrough, now runs the daily operations at the dealership.
“You go from lot to lot, brand to brand, state to state and everybody is clamoring for more cars,” he said. “You can’t get them.”
For years, a consumer shopping for a car would visit a dealership and view what’s on the lot, but that’s changed since the lots contain fewer vehicles. Consumers are doing research online, determining what will fit their needs and the brand they like, he said.
“Now what we do is pre-sell,” Moak said. “Every dealer has cars in the pipeline. We know what they are, we know the colors. Somebody gives us a deposit, picks one and when it gets here it’s theirs. If they don’t like it, they don’t have to take it.”
For the last 20 years, the automotive industry has built everything it could and shipped it to dealers, Moak said.
“A lot of times the dealers had more inventory on the ground than what they want,” he said. “It’s the way a manufacturer worked to get inventory on the ground better than their competitor.
Now that’s all gone.”
A big inventory of vehicles on the lot also meant incentives helped drive sales, Moak said. “We do have incentives but they’re not as large as what we had at one time,” he said.
Because the supply of vehicles is limited and demand for them is high, consumers now will pay more than the manufacturer’s suggested price for a vehicle, he said.
Hopefully by the end of the year, it will be easier to obtain vehicles but that’s hard to say for sure, Marshall said. “Who can predict the future?”
Moak expects it will take about a year for manufacturers to produce more vehicles.
“Eventually all of these supply issues will be dealt with and the computer chip issue and COVID will be in the rearview mirror,” he said, noting that he doubts dealership lots will ever be as filled with vehicles as they once were.
Marshall agrees. “I don’t think you’ll see that again,” he said.
