“As of now, there’s an almost six-digit number of cars that we would like to finish, that we can’t build and not all of which will ever get built,” said Markus Duesmann, chairperson of the company’s board of management, in comments published in Tuesday’s edition of the Augsburger Allgemeinen newspaper.

He said the problems will stretch well into 2022.

“We hope that we can see stabilization by the end of the first half of 2022 in terms of production and chip deliveries,” he said. “This chip crisis is going to rob us of a record year.”

He said supply chains need to be checked and reworked in the future.

“We are going to overhaul all of our delivery chains, to make sure we can guarantee billions of chips a year for our company, but we’re not going to begin manufacturing chips ourselves,” Duesmann told the newspaper.

Speaking on efforts to move away from combustion engines, Duesmann said it will be necessary to wean the world off the “drugs” of oil and petrol.

“We have to go into withdrawal and switch to electric engines and renewably sourced energy,” he said. “A lot has to happen in the next 30 to 40 years in order for the world to remain habitable.

“We have to do everything we can to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and the only way to do that is by doing without fossil fuel sources like coal or petroleum.”