For years the industry has battled a driver shortage, now there’s a truck shortage to contend with!
A report published today by the U.S. news outlet, the Financial Times, says the boom in demand for goods has left road freight businesses in the U.S and Europe scrambling to find trucks.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has further exacerbated the issue, shutting down the supply of critical components to manufacturers.
As we reported yesterday, MAN Truck and Bus have only just put manufacturing operations back online after a six-week shutdown forced upon the German brand by component supply issues.
The report says rising wages (up to as high as 30% increases) have worked with more people getting behind the wheel of trucks during and post-COVID, but now there’s a shortfall in equipment for those people to operate.
“The driver has been the biggest constraint of the last two years . . . The bigger supply constraint now is the truck and to some extent the trailer.” – Tim Denoyer from ACT Research.
Rico Luman, an economist at ING, says with a big backlog of orders for new trucks struggling to be filled by manufacturers, secondhand truck values are rocketing up.
“Trucks one to two years old are almost the same price as new ones at the moment: there is no option B to get spare capacity.”
Check out the full report from the Financial Times here.
