Spare parts are scarce: workshops in difficulty

D’Isep (Confartigianato): “The timing of the work has been skipped. Consumable pieces are missing and the products are expensive”

BELLUNO. “I don’t know if I can get your car ready, you have to see when the spare parts arrive.” Customers of Belluno car repairers are hearing this more and more often: the raw materials crisis weighing on the post-Covid recovery has become a daily problem in workshops, where the necessary spare parts become more difficult to obtain every day.

“The problem mainly affects repair shops, which need continuous spare parts, but for some weeks also the body shops have been experiencing important shortages on supplies, even for Italian cars”, explains Michele D’Isep, representative of the body shops of Confartigianato Belluno.

«We are also talking about spare parts that are not particularly rare», explains D’Isep, «such as the hoods and other consumable parts. On the other hand, the situation is global, linked to the scarcity of materials and electronic parts and the pandemic. And if we don’t produce machines we don’t even produce spare parts ».

Workshops and customers, therefore explains the body builder from Feltre, representative of the category within the provincial Confartigianato, must adapt.

“If possible, a replacement car is made available for the time necessary for the replacement to arrive, or perhaps the car is run with a used part, if it is not a vital part, waiting for the new part. . The problem is that we are no longer able to say “I’ll make you the car this week, or next week”, because we don’t have any more delivery forecasts on spare parts. If the national distributor of the car brand does not have the spare parts available, the spare parts dealers who supply them to us are also blocked. And customers who need a car to go to work or for their travels do not always understand our difficulties. Thus we find ourselves caught between the two fires ».

The general forecasts, underlines Michele D’Isep, are that at least until the end of the year it will go on like this, sailing on sight. “Last week I ordered a spare part for an Italian car”, he underlines, “and they told me it will arrive in mid-December”.

For the moment the situation does not weigh on the amount of work for the artisans of the sector but is heavily affecting the planning of the workshops and now also on costs.

“There is enough work,” says D’Isep, “that’s not the problem at the moment. But the supply difficulties also bring with them the increase in the costs of consumables, such as paints and chemicals for us body builders: the increases have been up to 20 percent since the beginning of the year, while in the past the increase was around 2 per cent per year. With such rapid increases, it also becomes a problem to get fair payments from insurance companies, which use tables to calculate repair rates ».stefano de barba