Ford has run into another production snag building its top-selling pickup trucks—this time due to difficulties getting door handles, reports The Wall Street Journal (May 4, 2023). The auto maker temporarily halted factory work at three plants where it makes both gasoline and electric versions of the F-150 pickup truck, unable to get the right door handles.
Production has since resumed at the facilities, but now workers are building some trucks with substitute handles—including ones that are the wrong color or don’t have the proper key holes—as a stopgap measure until the correct parts are available. Factory workers need to temporarily install the substitute handles to easily get in and out of the vehicle as it moves down the assembly line and to do certain checks from inside the vehicle. The incomplete trucks are then being parked and shipments to customers put on hold until the right handles can be swapped in.
The door handle constraint is the latest in a series of obstacles Ford has faced in the past year building both its F-Series pickup trucks—among the company’s biggest moneymakers—and a new electric version, the Lightning. In September, Ford was holding back shipments of some F-Series trucks due to difficulties getting badges that display the model name and blue oval logo. Earlier this year, it halted factory work on the F-150 Lightning for five weeks, after one caught fire because of a battery defect. (Factory production of the electric pickup resumed in March after Ford determined that the root cause of the fire was related to a supplier problem that caused the affected battery cells to short circuit while at a high state of charge).
A lack of semiconductors and other parts constraints have also disrupted factory work and resulted in it having to delay deliveries because the vehicles weren’t finished. The five-week plant shutdown hurt sales and weighed on its financial results.