171–180 of 720 posts
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.
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.
> just stepping into adulthood and financial responsibility. I am older than that (40 and my wife is 35) and while we have been independent professionals for a while, we now have a 1 year old so this summer for the first time in our lives we bought a house and a car. It was definitely harder to find a house (mainly less availability driving competitive bidding) and it took a little longer to find a car and we ended u…
This so-called “transitory inflation” is really starting to seem like it will parlay into full blown inflation.
A lot of the people screaming about inflation were doing so using the argument that there's too much spending and the "excess" money supply will cause the US to turn into Zimbabwe (Fed printers go brrrrrr): demand-pull inflation.
The price fluctuations caused pandemic-related supply issues (cost-push inflation) don't have much to do with money supply and stimulus packages.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation#Keynesian_view
If things get too hot, it's easy enough for interest rates to be pulled up, but given un/employment isn't at pre-pandemic levels, policy makers may let things ride for a while.
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.
As Taleb likes to say, an efficient system is the opposite of a robust system, kind of by definition. We are now witnessing the effects of our modern hyper-efficient just-in-time global manufacturing system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spend 5K on a really nice commuter electric bicycle. You'll be doing a solid for the Environment and you'll have an EV that makes you fitter.
My problem with 5K on an electric bike is the 50 mile commute one way to work in inclement weather.
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.
but stop and think for a second about all those short term profits Wall Street made by outsourcing all of our crucial manufacturing! Those congressional bribes don't pay themselves either! /s the worst part is our government is rewarding them for bad behavior, the article mentions the billion dollar chip subsidy program. So these companies made money outsourcing and will now make more by bringing it back. Instead the…
- shareholders (more profit)
- consumers (lower prices)
Second, you could say shareholders == Wall Street, but you could just as well say that shareholders are pension holders, banks, insurances and small private investors. All of these simply want to have return on their investment that is as high as possible. If that's good or bad is an interesting question, but the bottom line is that very few people are without blame here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
Ever since working on Integrated-Logistcs-Support I take issue when terms like reliability are thrown around. Because in the end it's a result of looking at Reliability (stuff not breaking down often), Availability (stuff being functional when planned to be), Maintainability (how easily stuff can be kept functioning and repaired when broken), Supportability (how easy spares can be get) and Testability (how easy it is…
What's probably true is that older cars that aren't rusted out can probably be kept running by people with the appropriate mechanical skills even in the absence of proper factory/3rd party parts for longer than modern vehicles can. Given intact supply chains, modern vehicles are more available overall. But, to the point of the article, modern vehicles are more susceptible to lack of parts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Car prices won't go back to normal again though. They will come up clever financing schemes to make people pay but the prices will never be reduced.