About 1,500 new Mitsubishi cars are sitting in a lot in Nanaimo, British Columbia, awaiting transportation to local and nationwide dealers, though there is no specific timetable for when that will happen.
The cars, which were shipped from Japan, arrived in Vancouver, B.C., about 10 days ago and were scheduled to be offloaded at the Annacis Auto Terminal Port facility in the lower mainland and go through the accessory process. They would then be delivered by truck to local dealers and by railway cars for dealers across the country. But with an abundance of ships carrying vehicles from various Asian manufacturers, the terminal was filled to capacity.
“Right now production and availability of product is freeing up and there are more and more ships leaving Asia and arriving in Vancouver and unfortunately that means that there is a lot more congestion than normal,” said Steve Carter, Director, Marketing at Mitsubishi Motor Sales of Canada, in an interview with Canadian auto dealer.
Rather than wait indefinitely for space to clear, and with no room in Seattle (where Mitsubishi also sends shipments), the decision was made to transport the cars by ferry to Port Nanaimo, an hour away, and unload them there. The space had been vacated by another manufacturer.
“We had conversations with the port in Nanaimo and it was an opportunity for us to take advantage of where we could drop off the vehicles,” said Carter. “The other thing we do when the vehicles arrive in Canada is [add] some accessories, but because we normally don’t drop vehicles off in Nanaimo, we had to make logistical arrangements to ship additional accessories to Nanaimo.”
The process is now much faster for Carter’s team, and it allows them to meet the demands of consumers that have been waiting days or weeks for their vehicles to arrive. Overall, the story resulted in an interesting and fortuitous situation for the Nanaimo Mitsubishi dealership, which is only 10 minutes away from where the cars are.
