The situation on the car market remains tense and keeps employees in the industry and customers in suspense.

As a Mercedes spokesman confirmed on Wednesday, there is now the next order stop in Germany.

After the G-Class off-road vehicle model, customers can no longer order the current version of the E-Class sedan since last Friday.

Due to the globally increasing number of orders, the production volume has been exhausted.

The station wagon version of the E-Class can still be ordered.

Christian Muessgens

Business correspondent in Hamburg.

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Gustave parts

Business correspondent in Stuttgart.

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Recently, the delivery times of the manufacturers had been getting longer and longer due to various influences.

While Mercedes-Benz justified the order freeze on Wednesday with a model change, the competitor Volkswagen makes no secret of the fact that the lack of semiconductors continues to determine the procedure in the plants.

The Wolfsburg main plant in particular, where volume models such as the VW Golf, Tiguan, Touran and Seat Tarraco roll off the assembly line, suffers from a blatant underutilization.

The situation has not improved since November, when the location slipped more and more into a crisis, said Daniela Cavallo, head of the works council, at a digitally broadcast works meeting on Wednesday.

The volume is "underground" and will remain so for a long time.

330,000 units less

The employees in Wolfsburg, as well as buyers of certain models from the VW Group, are feeling the consequences of a targeted internal allocation.

In the case of scarce control chips, priority has recently been given to new electric models, such as those that roll off the assembly line in Zwickau, but also to high-yield premium vehicles from subsidiaries such as Porsche.

The parent plant, on the other hand, was left behind with its volume models.

According to the works council, almost 400,000 vehicles left the plant last year, 330,000 fewer units than originally planned.

The target for the current year is 570,000 vehicles, which is still far from previous plans.

While business in the group as a whole is largely running smoothly and VW has full order books, the main plant is particularly hard hit by the shortage of electronic components, said group boss Herbert Diess at the works meeting.

He is aware of the critical situation at the site.

"That's why capacity adjustments are necessary, also in the medium term." The supply situation is improving, but even in the current year the group cannot build all the cars that customers are actually asking for.

The situation in Wolfsburg was one of the main points of contention in the power struggle between the works council and CEO Diess last December.

The Mercedes spokesman, on the other hand, reiterated that the order freeze for the E-Class sedan was not due to the lack of semiconductors: "It has nothing to do with the chips," he said.

Instead, he cited a pleasingly high level of demand and an upcoming model change in the coming year.

It is a completely normal process.

The presentation is surprising in that Mercedes has had problems with underutilization rather than overutilization in recent months.

Employees are repeatedly sent on short-time work.

Mercedes had only imposed an order freeze for the angular G-Class off-road vehicle model at the end of January.

It will take until 2024 anyway to deliver the existing G-Class orders, it said.

Customers who wanted to buy an E-Class sedan would continue to have a few exhibition, demonstration and dealer vehicles available, the spokesman said.