Jaguar Land Rover has stopped production of the strong-selling Land Rover Defender off-roader at its plant in Nitra, Slovakia, due to microchip shortages.
"Like other automotive manufacturers, we are currently experiencing some COVID-19 supply chain disruption, including the global availability of semiconductors, which is having an impact on our production schedules," the company said in a statement.
"As a result, we are adjusting production schedules in some of our plants to reflect this," the statement added.
JLR did not give any timeframe for the factory to restart production.
The company builds the Land Rover Defender 110 and Defender 90 models at the Nitra plant alongside the Discovery large SUV.
The company warned of difficulties fulfilling orders for the Defender in May when Chief Financial Officer Adrian Mardell told investors that order books for the car were approaching 100,000. He also said the wait for some plug-in-hybrid models was approaching 12 months.
The company gave no guidance on how the shortage would affect production for the next financial year.
Mardell said: "We will not yet know the scale of impact from the semiconductor challenges." The order bank for the Defender is now above 20,000, he said. Retail sales for the vehicle are approaching 7,000 a month, up from the predicted 5,000, he told investors.
The company sold 45,244 Defenders globally in the financial year to the end of March.
In the first five months, Land Rover sold 7,213 Defenders in Europe, according to figures from JATO Dynamics.
The rollout of the Defender was delayed last year after the Nitra plant was closed from late March to the beginning of May to halt the spread of the coronavirus.
Land Rover is getting ready to launch the longer Defender 130 as it expands the model's range to better fight rivals in markets such as the U.S., where seven-seat SUVs are popular.
