Has anyone considered redesigning the car to not need these particular chips?
Do a massive push to target a different chip or even a FPGA. There must be something out there to run the software.
Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%
571–580 of 720 posts
Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
No! It's negative WRT chip production rate! I have a phd in controls and meant what I said; I assume roboticsresearcher also knows some freshman-level control theory ;-). Stability ==== good in undergrad engineering, but not here. We DON'T want production rate to be stable when we have a global supply shortage! Here, a negative feedback loop is stabilizing the system in an undesirable equilibrium. I.e., the function…
Only partially facetious here: you have mistakenly decided that it it clamps at zero. If we consider the hoarding aspects, the feedback continues into net negative chip availability. Before long, there will be roving gangs of looters taking back the chips you thought you already had! ;-)
Yes, it's fair, I do assume that chip supply/demand isn't subject to the forces of roving gangs of looters :)
Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%
#573Many countries have a funny concept of strategic industries. In mine, dairy is a strategic industry that is coddled by government so that we can have a local source. But every country thinks that so there’s foes and allies that can supply us UHT or powder milk on a moment’s notice. And if our milk supply disappeared tomorrow, everyone over 1y could substitute with 10000000 different things for nutrition. Cars are ano…
Are you in Canada by chance? I have fond childhood memories of smuggling cheese across the border from the US because the dairy protectionism has resulted in prices that are 3x higher. We used to do that with electronics too, but Canada has no electronics industry so it's weird why it was so much more expensive. The gap has decreased in recent years.
Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're right, but it's partly because we weren't couching the quest for efficiency in the context of risk. I might be more time efficient by speeding everywhere, but that efficiency gain needs to be understood in terms of how much additional risk it incurs.
Moving fast and breaking things isn't national security. (I agree with you)
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Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
Finance guy here, two things. You are looking at it in retrospect. "I should have bought a house" is no different than "I should have bought X stock" when you're looking at the price history backwards. At the time, it could have gone up or down. EG we just bought a house, I have many reasons to expect that it could drop in value over the next bunch of years. Second, you may not be doing proper calculations. I would n…
Whatever helps you sleep at night :D My parents bought a detatched home at 20 with minimum wage jobs. I bought a townhouse at 40 with a high paying career. My kid is going to be 60 by the time he can afford a home. It's fucked. Buy now.
Reminds me of what I've heard Porsche aficionados say: "You can't pay too much for a classic Porsche. You can only buy it too soon".
They're not making any more of them, and demand and prices only go up (until maybe one day they don't, I don't know).
Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much would it cost to set up TSMC inside US borders? One president cycle? 4 F-35s? One SLS? A nuclear submarine? According to this page, sorting by cost, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... the most expensive fab is 33 Giga$. TSMC is 17G$. pennies on the dollar in our 1-3Trillion infrastructure bill. Make america fab again. EDIT: it appears this is in the 2T infrastructure bill. https:…
Building it is one thing. Making it operational without importing talent and running it profitably is another. Taiwan has some of the best fab engineers who work at US minimum wage salaries. Of course you can pull them away with higher pay like China is doing, but that means profitability will likely go for a toss.
We pay junior engineers who work at social media companies six figures so why cant we pay taiwanese fab engineers enough?
Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much everyone understands that computer chips are needed for everything these days though. The population can relate just fine. It's just there's no one rich and powerful who wants to make the investment that is making it an issue.
I'm not sure that the population can relate to building a semiconductor ecosystem in the USA -- when a state gives incentives to bring movie production there, people think "Well look at all of those jobs and movies give our state great exposure", but when the government wants to spend billions helping to build a next-gen fab plant here, then it's like "wait, I paid thousands of dollars for my phone and computer, why…
I’m pretty sure the average person knows computer chips are important.
> wait, I paid thousands of dollars for my phone and computer, why are we paying them to build plants here, don't we pay them enough
This line of reasoning isn’t generally extended to any other area of production, so I don’t see why it would apply here.
Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought Toyota invented not doing that.
After the 2011 earthquake they came to the conclusion that for some hard to source parts you have to keep a big stockpile. Basically if a part can only be produced by one or two parties there is too much risk of that source going away and disrupt everything else. This also applies all the way down the chain so if you got part A that can be made by 20 contractors but if all of those contractors depend on the same sour…
Should this be called the left-pad moment of just-in-time?
Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
this. If you look at all the strategic industry subsidies, you will see this common denominator. Corn in the US is stupidly subsidized, so much corn that it ends up in car tanks. But guess who will not have a famine even if the worst war + disasters strike? Car factories might not make good tanks, but the mechanical engineers and tooling knowledge is invaluable and can't be scaled up overnight. Same with solar panels…
> Corn in the US is stupidly subsidized, so much corn that it ends up in car tanks What would the land be doing without subsidies?
Serve nature? Keep bio diversity and be a buffer for nature.
Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a puzzle to me why companies like nvidia didn't just raise prices They did. There have been at least three major prices increases which rocked entire industries. There have been reports of people paying 30x the usual price. https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3133901/europe...
Understandable but it didn't seem to happen like this in commercial GPU sales.
Because there is no run for commercial grade GPUs from miners or gamers stuck indoor.