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Does anyone know the particulars of the shortage? Talking more about the commodity chips. Very hard to get anything from TI, ST or Microchip. Which fabs and nodes are specifically overloaded?
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Please write back when Tesla learns how to correctly apply paint to a car or fit body panels, or well, pretty much everything else that makes an actual car a car instead of a disposable gadget.
Ah yes, the most important function of a car, the paint...
As a chip supplier, I'd be feeling a lot of pressure right now. In the short term you can squeeze and the tail can wag the dog for a bit. But longer term this opens the door wide open for new competitors in the market and / or vertical integration.
Maybe? It seems to me the overheads of establishing a fab process anywhere near the incumbents are astronomical. I would guess that even this bottleneck in supply would represent a minuscule fraction of that overhead. What are the actual numbers?
It depends which parts are in short supply. A lot of automotive parts are still on 20+ year old nodes. 90nm to 130 or even 180nm. I would guess those are not the parts experiencing shortages though. So that leaves the fancy stuff. Bummer if a car can't be built because the infotainment SoC can't be obtained because it's competing for production with crypto mining GPUs.
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Actually Toyota's manufacturing process was changed after Fukushima and was one of the only companies that plans for situations like this: https://www.autoblog.com/2021/03/09/toyota-how-it-avoided-se... Edit, what the other poster said.
yeah, but about everyone else?
"Porsche will provide cars with ‘fake chips’ to reduce delivery times" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28042518
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I believe that driving an old car for longer has a smaller environmental impact than consistently driving newer cars as the bulk of emissions is during the manufacturing process. I have no data to support my statement, it's just my hunch. I'd be very keen if someone with the right knowledge can approve or disprove my statement.
Not true at all, ~80% of emissions from an ICE car are from using and servicing it. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l... Looking at that chart I think you could build a brand new ICE car, throw it away, build an EV and drive that instead and still come out ahead?
I was under the impression decent quality ICE vehicles are proven to last at least 320k km these days, and can easily last 15+ years.
Have electric vehicles even been in use long enough to have sufficient data to compare?
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Why? Because older, less efficient cars are being kept on the road for longer?
I believe that driving an old car for longer has a smaller environmental impact than consistently driving newer cars as the bulk of emissions is during the manufacturing process. I have no data to support my statement, it's just my hunch. I'd be very keen if someone with the right knowledge can approve or disprove my statement.
Moreover manufacturers have been reducing their carbon footprint lately. As an example VW reports that 70% of the energy the use in plants is provided by renewable sources.
That being said while emissions rules have been getting more stringent over the years, they're increasingly being followed through introducing EVs, not improvements in engine efficiency.
Toyota was one of the few (only?) companies to keep a large stockpile of chips on hand to continue production in case of a supply interruption. They kept something like two years worth on hand. I guess 18 months of doing the extremely heavy lifting for the whole industry has taken its toll and now they're in the same boat.
I thought Toyota invented not doing that.
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Please write back when Tesla learns how to correctly apply paint to a car or fit body panels, or well, pretty much everything else that makes an actual car a car instead of a disposable gadget.
Ah yes, the most important function of a car, the paint...