New-car delivery delays to continue after end of Australian port strikes
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Strikes may have ended at some of Australia’s largest ports for new vehicle arrivals, but buyers aren’t out of the woods yet with delays.
A backlog at ports overseas is set to create delays for Australian customers in the queue for a new car, the boss of one of the country’s fastest-growing car makers has warned.
Industrial action at top ports in Melbourne, Brisbane, Fremantle, and Port Kembla south of Sydney put the brakes on new-vehicle arrivals in recent weeks, after demands of increased pay for stevedores from the maritime union.
While the strikes have since ended – and the estimated 35,000-plus cars on ships waiting offshore can now be unloaded – experts have cautioned the delays are not over.
Ordinarily, vehicle carriers are able to dock in Australia, quickly unload their cargo, and return to their origin ports overseas to pick up more cars also destined for local showrooms.
But the delays forced many of the vessels to wait in Australian waters for a week or more, delaying their return – and forming a backlog.
“It’s something that’s going to be still an issue for a little while,” David Smitherman, CEO of BYD’s Australian distributor EVDirect, told Drive.
“And once you have these huge vessels that are backed up, they have to go back to the manufacturer then come back again.
“There’s actually quite a knock-on effect. So I don’t think we’re through it just yet.”
Smitherman could not specify how much of a delay the backlog will create for BYD customers, but said the company is doing what it can to get cars to buyers as quickly as possible.
“It’s really hard to be really clear on that number because we literally have over 3000 cars in Australian waters that have been delayed from getting offloaded,” he told Drive last week, minutes after the maritime union confirmed the end of the strikes.
“There’s a manifest of all these different vehicles on boats, and they have to get them all off, so there’s no real clear-cut answer.
“I can assure you BYD is a really great supplier, but there’s only so many boats to go around. … We’re looking at every angle on how to get customers’ cars to them, but a lot of this is just simply out of our control.”
MORE: New-car arrivals to resume at key Australian ports as strikes end (published Wednesday 15 January)
Not every port in Australia was shut during the industrial action – only some operated by Qube, a large Australian company – leading some brands to consider redirecting ships elsewhere, and transporting vehicles by road to their intended destination.
“The difficulty you’ve got … [is there are] internal issues around road transport,” the BYD executive said.
“We certainly had a look at bringing vehicles to Newcastle [a Qube port not affected by the strikes], but by the time you organise that, then it’s just another level of complexity.”
Customer deliveries of the BYD Shark 6 plug-in hybrid ute commenced the same day the strikes received widespread media attention, as the first batch of vehicles was unloaded a few days earlier at a then-open Brisbane port.
The port strikes come two years after unprecedented quarantine bottlenecks kept as many as 60,000 new vehicles in a marine traffic jam at and off the coast of Australian docks.
It compounded stock shortages faced by top car brands in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as customer demand increased at the same time as a lack of semiconductors and other components slowed production.
Today, however, wait times on many popular new vehicles have all but vanished, and demand has returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Prior to the port strikes, Toyota – the country’s top-selling new-car brand for the past 22 years – forecast annual sales of 1.17 to 1.18 million new vehicles in 2025, down from a record 1.24 million in 2024.
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