O’Leary: The chip related part of those woes has eased
off considerably. That was the main problem for pretty much all of last year. That hasn’t completely gone away, but it’s mostly gone away. So that’s gotten significantly better. Now, the major issues would be more along the lines of, I would call it like historical types of legacy parts, like frame rails tires, wheels, brake components, things like that. For a variety of reasons, those are the ones that are bedeviling everybody right now. That’s not unusual in a time of high production output across the industry. There are always a few suppliers or a few components that somehow end up being the pacing item for every- body else. That’s what’s going on right now. One of the big opportunities is we and I’m sure others
incurred an awful lot of waste in our extraneous labor, handling and premium freight, to get these vehicles out the door. When we were having chip shortages, it wasn’t unusual to have to touch a truck or a bus multiple times, until you got the precise chip or a component or what- ever it was you were missing, to get that [vehicle through the production line]. Now, the big opportunity is to drive out all that extra handling, labor and freight costs. Now
we’re in a more normalized fashion because what typical- ly happens is, once you get comfortable with that, it just kind of becomes routine. And then you don’t think too hard about chasing that cost out. That’s typically the next step that we’re going through right now, to try to drive as much of that cost out as we can and get people back in kind of more a normal operating mode and let them re- alize that, hey, we’re not in the middle of a war anymore. There are a few battles [remaining], but you don’t have to bring out all the super expensive tools to win the war. Just do what you need to do to win the battle.
STN: You’re referring to the federal Chips and Science Act? O’Leary: We won’t see the benefit from that for prob-
ably four or five years because that’s how long it takes to actually build a chip plant, hire the people, get it online, get it up to speed and in the volumes that it should pro- duce. That’s a good four or five years down the road. But in the meantime, what we’ve seen is due to things going on in the economy, slower growth, depending on where you are, inflation, etc. Passenger cars and consumer
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