On Shortages, Dishwashers, Trucks, And Broken Supply Chains

Well, a couple days ago our dishwasher, that I had to repair back in March, decided to say goodbye to it all.  It will clean no more.  It spits out the soap pod, shoots a but of cursory water around and then fails, and then it finally failed completely and wouldn't even do that.

Given that it is all of three years old and it has decided to quit, that rather sucked.

So looking for new dishwashers and it turns out they are now hard to find.

Want a Bosch, which is a highly rated and recommended brand?  Most places are back-ordered one year.   Most other brands are limited in stock and back-orders are measured in numbers of months, not weeks.

So, we went to a local appliance store and ordered what they had in stock, which came down to a choice between all of three models out of the many they had on display.  Most models are currently unobtanium.  We ordered a GE dishwasher - as it had an excellent rating, nice features, most importantly that it was available and it works and gets dishes clean, made in the USA, parts are plentiful and better exceed the Whirlpools pathetic 3-year lifespan. We shall see.

On to trucks.

My friend has a new Ford diesel truck, bought with a high-level warranty and all the trimmings.  Great truck but  .  .  .

Unfortunately a sensor, a $20 part has gone bad, which puts the truck in limp mode to travel 25 miles to get to a dealer.

We were going to take it to Thunder over Michigan but it was not to be.  It has now been sitting at the dealer for over 3 weeks as the dealer cannot get the part, and the dealer is refusing to honor the warranty that provides a rental car for such a breakdown as they have no rental cars available and will not get one for him.  

Nice huh?  Apparently some of these sensors are sitting on the unfinished yet built newer trucks that are sitting on factory lots but cannot be sold as they lack chips etc, but they won't pull the sensor off one of those to get his truck up and running. 

He's also been told that the Ford factory workers are raiding those "mostly completed" vehicles for parts so they can roll out more "mostly completed" vehicles off the line and get credit for building them.  Apparently, once the parts come available they will be shipped to dealers, and dealer service people and not the factories will be responsible for installing the parts per what he was told. 

This will certainty make buying a 2021 year Ford vehicle a rather risky prospect as the build quality and the parts shuffling will make them rather suspect in terms of build quality.

These supply chain problems are causing quite a drag on the economy - used car prices here are way, way up, and there's a dearth of new cars available to be bought or leased, and appliances and many other goods reliant on chips and electronics are clearly in short supply.