DETROIT - General Motors Co is more than halfway through shipping newly assembly pickups that it had then parked due to a shortage of semiconductor chips that prevented the No. 1 U.S. automaker from shipping the trucks, a top executive said on Friday.

"We've made great progress," Steve Cralisle, GM's North American chief executive said at the Reuters Events Automotive Summit. "We're a bit better than halfway through that at the moment and our goal would be to clear out our '21 model years by the end of the year. We'll have a bit of a tail of '22 model years into the new year but not for too long."

The global chip shortage has forced automakers like GM to idle production or in some cases mostly build vehicles and then park them until the necessary chips can be installed, allowing those vehicles to be then shipped to dealers.

  - Reuters