It’s deer season. Riley Hershberger, owner of Iowa Collision and Paint, said about 90% of his business right now is repairing cars that have hit deer. But this year, he’s also dealing with complex supply chain issues that make it hard for him to get the parts he needs to repair damaged vehicles.

And Hershberger isn’t alone — autobody shops across the industry are all dealing with supply chain issues, having to wait weeks for parts they used to be able to procure in a manner of days.

Chris Swartzendruber, owner of CS Autobody, said supply chain issues have made if harder to get parts he needs to repair vehicles during this time, when his shop is busier than average, too.

“It doesn’t matter make or model, it’s just random things,” Swartzendruber said. “It could take three, four weeks to get stuff, is what we’re seeing right now… it used to be a week at the most. We usually order parts a week ahead of time, but now we order them for a month ahead of time so we can have stuff here by the time we have it scheduled.”

Hershberger said the supply chain issues drastically affect his turnaround times, which can leave customers without a vehicle for longer periods of time.

“If we’re delayed one part, and I’ve got a vehicle here that’s not operable, that just pushes back the customer getting their car back,” he said. “And right now there’s a huge shortage of rental cars, like from Enterprise and Hertz. A lot of times the customer will have a rental agreement from their insurance company, but lately they haven’t been able to get rental cars.”

Hershberger said he owns several loaner cars that he can provide to customers, but even those are limited. Still, he said, most customers have been patient.

“Everybody for the most part is understanding, but you can only tell somebody so many times that their car won’t be done for another three or four days.”

Swartzendruber said he’s dealt with supply chain issues before, so some extent.

“Before the pandemic, we’d seen some strikes. GM went on strike and that caused some issues to get parts because no trucks were moving, no parts were being made, whatever they had in inventory was getting wiped out, so we had vehicles just sitting around waiting for parts until we could get them,” Swartzendruber said. “Once the strike ended after about six weeks, that didn’t solve the parts problem because there was so much backlog from backordered parts and semi-trailers sitting full of parts that couldn’t be shipped. It took months to get that straightened out.”

He said he expects this supply chain issue to be the same — that it might take years for the industry to recover from the current backlogs and labor shortages.

“It’s challenging, that’s for sure,” Swartzendruber said. “It’s changed how I do business and how I go about the repair process and communicating with the customer. At least everybody is pretty aware of what’s going on with the country and the world with the supply chain thing, so people are pretty understanding about it.”