Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to note the opening of temporary channels at the port 

The Port of Baltimore is the busiest in America for shipments of cars. And the deadly accident that brought down the Francis Scott Key Bridge will have a ripple affect across the automotive industry.

“We have both imports and exports of vehicles – cars and light trucks that move through the port, as well as parts,” John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation told NPR. “There is absolutely going to be some disruption. What we don’t know at this point is the extent of the disruption as the companies work on moving around the port.”

The early morning hours of March 26, the container ship MV Dali  lost control and collided with a support of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which spans the Patapsco River leading to the Port of Baltimore. That collapse killed two people with four others are presumed dead.

Largest Port for Cars

Crews opened a second temporary channel on April 2 allowing a limited amount of marine traffic to bypass the mangled wreckage of Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge, which had blocked the vital port’s main shipping channel since its destruction one week ago. Work is ongoing to open a third channel that will allow larger vessels to pass through the bottleneck and restore more commercial activity. The channels are open primarily to vessels involved in the cleanup effort, along with some barges and tugs that have been stuck in the Port of Baltimore.

But the port not being fully opened  is an issue for the auto industry as vehicles accounted for nearly half of all 2023 Baltimore Port imports, with an estimated $27 billion in vehicles and vehicle parts moved through the port.

The Port of Baltimore handled 847,158 cars and light trucks last year, making it the nation’s largest port for automobiles for the 13th year in a row. Manufacturers, including Audi, Bentley, Ford, General Motors, Jaguar Land Rover, Lamborghini, Mazda, Mercedes, Nissan, Subaru, Toyota, and Volvo, depend on the port for importing, exporting, and parts shipment.

President Joe Biden stated federal officials would “move heaven and earth” to reopen the bridge and the port to minimize the economic impacts. “We’re going to get it up and running again as soon as possible,” Biden said.

Ro/Ro Issue

One reason the Port of Baltimore is so popular with automakers is its ability to handle the large ships that can accommodate Ro/Ro, or roll on-roll off, cargo.

Additionally, the port has direct connections to the Midwest, where much automotive manufacturing takes place, via the Norfolk Southern and CSX railroads. And the port is located further inland than any other Mid-Atlantic, which can shave as much as a day off shipping times.

Wilmington, DE; Charleston, SC and Boston are among the ports that can handle Ro/Ro cargo, according to Ports America.

Supply Chain

Ford and General Motors both said Tuesday they would need to divert shipments to other ports during the closure.

“We’ll work on the workarounds…(diverting) along the East Coast or elsewhere in the country” Ford CFO John Lawler said. “It will probably lengthen the supply chain a bit.”

Jason Miller, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, said the impacts of the Baltimore closure wouldn’t rival those seen during the pandemic or the disruptions from a railroad strike as most vehicles sold in the U.S. have their final assembly in North America, except high-end European models.

But Miller warned “there may be some hiccups at the dealerships.”

Dealerships Reactions

Local dealerships across the U.S. are bracing for the impact. Gary Rome of Gary Rome Hyundai in Holyoke, MA, told the Western Mass News the bridge collapse won’t directly impact Hyundai or Kia since they use the port in Philadelphia.

“It’s going to create some havoc, but they’ll figure out a way to redirect the vehicles and get them delivered so it will impact us because there will be more traffic at the ports that we use,” Rome said. “It’s going to take them a while to figure out the logistics of how they are going to redirect all of these cars and all of these deliveries and it’s not going to be a short-term fix, they’re going to have to figure out a long-term fix.”

Rome expects new-vehicle buyers will have to wait an extra two to four weeks for it to come in but he doesn’t anticipate an increase in the price of vehicles.

Views from Pennsylvania, Ohio

Tim Profit, President of Savage Auto Group in Pennsylvania’s Berks County, is keeping an eye on the new places his cars will be coming from.

“My Compasses that we’re going into Baltimore are now going up to Boston,” Profit said. “It doesn’t sound like a big deal but it’s a big deal to delay it a couple weeks.”

Profit believed that Norfolk, Jacksonville and Boston will be the ports that will have to pick up the slack. “It depends on what mode line comes in for me and where it goes I think some of our trucks are going to go south and some of our Jeeps are going to go north,” he said.

Tim Elliott, the executive vice president of the Northeast Ohio Auto Dealers Association, said there’s about a 60-day supply of new car inventory already on the ground in storage lots across the country.

Lesson from Pandemic

But, depending on how long it takes for the port to fully reopen, it could keep brands from easily restocking some makes and models, forcing them to find alternate routes to deliver their products.

Alliance for Automotive Innovation’s Bozzella noted the events of recent years has prepared the industry to adapt.

“What we learned from the pandemic is that significant disruptions to the automotive supply chain can have an impact on the market,” he said. “What we’ve also learned from the pandemic is companies have thought about their supply chains and resiliency in a, I think, more strategic way than perhaps was done in the past.”