Hurry Up and Wait: Car Launches Delayed in 2023

Building cars is hard, and it turns out that building electric cars may be even harder. According to number posted by eggheads at tony consulting firm PwC, roughly a third of new vehicles had their launches skewered in 2023 – with EVs not helping matters in the slightest.

Speaking to the complexity of rolling out machines with which legacy automakers are still grappling, Akshay Singh, an automotive partner at PwC, opined that the “designs are not as mature as the old traditional components,” which may lead to “significant late changes and that contributes to the launch issues." We’ve covered numerous such examples of such delays in the past year, including the Volvo EX90 and frustrations at General Motors.

The latter is an easy target, especially for this website, but there can be no doubting the clustermug which could happen if vehicles of this sort are pushed out to market before they are fully baked. Witness the myriad of problems experienced by some other publications with the Chevrolet Blazer EV, news followed by an alleged cavalcade of similar tales after the likes of outlets such as Edmunds and InsideEVs published their stories. With the vast similarities underpinning the Equinox EV and Blazer EV, not to mention the Ultium guts in the General’s EV pickup trucks, pushing back launch dates probably isn’t a bad idea.

Back at PwC, they go on to elaborate that while 34 percent of all vehicle launches – 38, by their count – experienced delays in 2023, only 5 percent missed their target dates in 2018. While PwC doesn’t immediately give a figure for that year, our (very) unofficial count pegs the number anywhere between 35 and 40, so the sample size should be similar (and, more importantly, relevant). There were a slew of products from Lexus in ’18, plus the Wrangler, Crosstrek, Odyssey, Kona, and Traverse, just to name a few. To these jaundiced eyes, the lone mainstream EV trotted out that year was the Nissan Leaf, though please by all means feel free to correct us in the comments.

What does 2024 portend? With only four days left in this calendar year, we won’t have long to wait and find out.

[Image: GM]

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