Photo: Ford
In the bizarre world we live nowadays, with semiconductor shortages at every turn, literally running out of your company’s logo badges to put on your cars, kind of takes the irony prize, cake, and LOL of the week altogether. Especially in contrast to the $5.6 billion mega-facility “BlueOval City” Ford is building.
The car manufacturer allegedly couldn’t honor the customer delivery schedule in some cases because it simply didn’t have its iconic blue oval badges for certain models. Moreover, Ford apparently ran out of some nameplate models as well. According to the Wall Street Journal, a Ford PR representative confirmed the badges and nameplates story.
This might be funny to a certain extent for an outside "chillaxed" observer, but people at Ford could be sweating a bit because of the issue. Their stock on the market went down from $14.93 on September 19 to $12.31 on September 23 at the time of writing. Obviously, it wasn't because of the badges and nameplates alone, but that surely didn't help.
The supply issues seem to have affected the F-Series line of trucks and some SUVs. The chairs at the top even considered 3D printing their own badges until they were resupplied, sources claim. The main trouble with 3D printing is that the process itself is slow. But there would also be the issue of the quality of the badges resulting from that. Printed plastic doesn't really exude excellence.
However, the company didn't confirm or deny these claims. Yet, the spokesperson did say that Ford will ship the vehicles with the missing badges to dealers, which will fix the problem locally.
In total, the company said that it will have a stock of 40,000-45,000 vehicles by the end of September. The lack of badges isn’t the only reason for this. The semiconductor shortages are said to be responsible as well. Ford will report the entire third-quarter results on October 26.
This might be funny to a certain extent for an outside "chillaxed" observer, but people at Ford could be sweating a bit because of the issue. Their stock on the market went down from $14.93 on September 19 to $12.31 on September 23 at the time of writing. Obviously, it wasn't because of the badges and nameplates alone, but that surely didn't help.
The supply issues seem to have affected the F-Series line of trucks and some SUVs. The chairs at the top even considered 3D printing their own badges until they were resupplied, sources claim. The main trouble with 3D printing is that the process itself is slow. But there would also be the issue of the quality of the badges resulting from that. Printed plastic doesn't really exude excellence.
However, the company didn't confirm or deny these claims. Yet, the spokesperson did say that Ford will ship the vehicles with the missing badges to dealers, which will fix the problem locally.
In total, the company said that it will have a stock of 40,000-45,000 vehicles by the end of September. The lack of badges isn’t the only reason for this. The semiconductor shortages are said to be responsible as well. Ford will report the entire third-quarter results on October 26.
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