MACOMB TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WXYZ) — Retired General Motors employee Jim Navaroli showed 7 Action News the Cadillac CT5 he purchased from a local dealership in March of 2022.
The promise, the two missing chips from the car would be installed by fall 2022.
"Well that didn’t happen," Navaroli revealed.
The Macomb Township man has now gone a full year without two chips needed for his car.
"Some people think that we’ll never get them, so we’ll see," he said.
One of the missing chips heats and cools the steering wheel and the other alerts the driver when the car is too close to another vehicle.
Navaroli said at the dealership he bought the car from, "It became a joke, because every time I talked to the dealer they said, ‘Yeah we’re just waiting.'"
According to data from Auto Forecast Solutions, the chips that Navaroli's car is missing have been highly impacted by the global chip shortage. However, the data shows it's getting better.
"We’re still a distance away from normal production but the chip supply is getting better and a lot of manufacturers are finding more chips dedicated to their vehicles," Sam Fiorani, the vice president of Global Vehicle Forecasting, said.
Fiorani's team has been tracking the chip shortage for just over two years.
Their data shows that globally, about 10.6 million vehicles were taken out of production plans in 2021 due to the semiconductor shortage.
That impact was reduced to 4.4 million vehicles in 2022, and in 2023 it's expected to be reduced to 2.8 million.
"We’re hoping that by the end of 2023 we don’t notice it as much, but with chips coming online as they are, it will take awhile until it goes away completely," Fiorani said.
This month, Navaroli said he received a phone call from the dealership saying GM sent them a letter informing them the chips for his car are finally in.
Now, the dealership just needs to order the chips for his car and install them. When will that be exactly? They still couldn't tell him.
"Knowing GM, that could be another year," he said.
7 Action News reached out to General Motors and asked if they would like to speak with us to provide an update about when their customers will receive their missing chips.
They offered the following statement:
"We remain committed to working with a sense of urgency to complete these retrofits as soon as the supply of chips become available. The timing for each retrofit feature is different and ongoing. General Motors is taking concrete steps to address the impact of the well-known industry wide semi-conductor shortage. This includes recent collaboration agreements announced to help improve, among other thing’s GM’s chip supply for the long-term. We will communicate with the impacted customers as soon as their vehicle is eligible for the retrofit."
To learn about the new collaboration agreement, click here.
