Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Automakers were already struggling with chip supply TBH, that is their own fault. When the pandemic started a year ago, they chickened out thinking people won't have money to buy anymore cars and halted production, cancelling orders for semiconductors. Then, when the demand for cars exploded, since nobody wanted to be on a subway/bus full of people carrying a contagious virus, they wanted their chips to resume produ…
I'm not sure we should be so quick to fault them. The unemployment rate when the pandemic really started building up steam was absolutely staggering so a lot of people quite reasonably expected a severe recession along with severe contraction of consumer demand to follow. That we didn't experience one is a minor miracle (and printing of a ridiculous amount of money).
The high unemployment rate during the pandemic was(and still is) mostly formed of people working in the service industry, travel, minimum wage earners and people with little to no skills and those people were having a rough time even before the pandemic so they were never on the automakers' radar of customers would buy a new car, not in a million years. Those people can only afford to buy used.
On the other hand, the typical new car buyer, the middle classer and above, saw little unemployment, on the contrary, many have seen their best years yet, which is why the demand for new cars (among other things) exploded.
