Paccar CEO says truckmaker ‘hustling’ to cope with chip shortage

Paccar Inc., a heavy-duty truck manufacturer, is doing a bit of “hustling” to cope with a global shortage of computer chips, much like a would-be rival in semi trucks that also happens to be one of the world’s most valuable companies.

The Bellevue, Washington-based company said Tuesday it found workarounds for the semiconductor shortfall by repurposing some chips and re-engineering others. That’s similar to what Tesla Inc. is doing to keep its factories humming by rewriting the code on chips in what Elon Musk has called “a matter of weeks.”

An analyst with Melius Research on Paccar’s conference call asked if it was emulating Tesla by “kind of out hustling” for chips, and Chief Executive Officer R. Preston Feight said work is being done along those lines—even if he seemed to take exception to that description.

The truckmaker’s engineers are “doing a fantastic job of ‘hustling,’ as you put it,” Feight said. “They are re-engineering different chips or taking places where maybe two chips were required and re-engineering them into requiring only one chip.”

The company delivered 32,800 trucks in the three months ended Sept. 30, down from 36,000 a year ago. Paccar posted better-than-expected third-quarter revenue of $5.5 billion, but its earnings of $1.08 a share missed estimates. It also cut a full-year capital expenditure forecast to between $525 million and $550 million, down from $550 million to $600 million.