So new cars are going to be come more expensive due to supply limitations and in turn used cars will continue to become more expensive as they can rise to a certain % of the new car price. At the same time housing prices continue to sky rocket. Seems like not a great time for someone just stepping into adulthood and financial responsibility.
The difference being that lots of people want to keep those inflated housing prices high (nimbyism), whereas nearly everyone wants car prices to go back to normal.
The article (and others about this topic) indicate that the chip shortage isn't just a static. They all claim that chip and other supply chains (all based on South East Asian) are all under new pressure from delta strain spread. In fact, I wonder how much of this really is chip supply vs general supply. Most articles on this open with headlines about chip supply, but then contains quotes from Toyota about "supply" an…
Yeah, this also makes no sense to me: > The Covid pandemic boosted demand for appliances that use chips, such as phones, TVs and games consoles. SOCs in phones and game consoles are produced on very different processes than chips used in cars, no? Cars don't need the smallest dies or most energy-efficient chips. These industries are not competing for the same capacity. Or am I missing something?
modern car entertainment systems often use some of the same parts as tvs/game systems/pcs etc
perhaps the engine ECU is not the chip that is in low supply
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.
It is different to keep large inventory of everything because you are inefficient and can't function without it and different to decide to stockpile specific parts because of perceived potential risks while being efficient with everything else.
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.
Maybe this is a dumb question, but does anyone still produce cars without chips? It's possible, and in the current environment it seems like it would be a major competitive advantage-- and might be more reliable in general.
>and might be more reliable in general
Cars in, say, the 1960s were not "more reliable in general." It's not all semiconductor-related of course--they also rusted out quickly in areas that got snow--but 5 years/50K miles is about what you were looking at for vehicle lifetime. Also much lower fuel efficiency, to say nothing of lack of what we'd consider routine safety features today.
So new cars are going to be come more expensive due to supply limitations and in turn used cars will continue to become more expensive as they can rise to a certain % of the new car price. At the same time housing prices continue to sky rocket. Seems like not a great time for someone just stepping into adulthood and financial responsibility.
Not really a great time for anyone really, at least from the vantage point you're referring to.
The article (and others about this topic) indicate that the chip shortage isn't just a static. They all claim that chip and other supply chains (all based on South East Asian) are all under new pressure from delta strain spread. In fact, I wonder how much of this really is chip supply vs general supply. Most articles on this open with headlines about chip supply, but then contains quotes from Toyota about "supply" an…
Yeah, this also makes no sense to me: > The Covid pandemic boosted demand for appliances that use chips, such as phones, TVs and games consoles. SOCs in phones and game consoles are produced on very different processes than chips used in cars, no? Cars don't need the smallest dies or most energy-efficient chips. These industries are not competing for the same capacity. Or am I missing something?
They certainly overlap. SoCs aren't the only chips in game consoles or other devices, different kinds of chip production have shared supply chains that themselves are struggling, SoCs used in cars aren't necessarily that different from the ones in other appliances (e.g. NVidia Tegra X1 is used both in the Nintendo Switch and some cars, and probably a pile of other things) ...
This is a misunderstanding of lean manufacturing. Lean is not about eliminating every stockpile, it's about thinking through your supply needs and only stockpiling what is necessary.
Were manufacturers stockpiling what was unnecessary before lean manufacturing? It's an absurd notion that anybody would stockpile things without consideration of inventory costs.
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.
Maybe this is a dumb question, but does anyone still produce cars without chips? It's possible, and in the current environment it seems like it would be a major competitive advantage-- and might be more reliable in general.
One big advantage of low inventories is you do not have to fix or trash lots of parts if they were made out of spec. In the case of chips the odds are they are all good. It is just the cost of ownership but not the cost of refitting.
>One big advantage of low inventories is you do not have to fix or trash lots of parts if they were made out of spec
Instead you either stop/slow production or shove them in your products and hope for the best.
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.
Maybe this is a dumb question, but does anyone still produce cars without chips? It's possible, and in the current environment it seems like it would be a major competitive advantage-- and might be more reliable in general.
It is possible, but the cars will be taxed into oblivion, because of push to electric cars. This is nothing new in finland because nobody there buys new car anyways, and continues to recycle existing old cars. Though that will also soon become impossible due to rising taxes to get rid of the old cars. I'm not sure which here is supposed to be more eco-friendly in the long run, but I suppose if you make people impossible to own anything that'll eventually win?