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Carmakers feel chip crisis easing

bloomberg.com

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Re: Carmakers feel chip crisis easing

#151

Post by ChrisRR »

KerrAvon wrote: post #86
walrus01 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Context: for ages, OEMs (the factory) have had a belief that Americans will not wait to buy a car. On the contrary, we recently added a 3rd car, and it ended up being a $4000 used Toyota Camry. My first choice would have been a Corolla or civic but none were available at a reasonable price, condition and mileage. Due to the well known rise in used car prices. It's in good enough condition and meets all the requirem…

I applaud you for not taking the bait on the Model 3, which is overrated, but I cannot fathom purchasing an appliance car like a Camry. You can’t possibly enjoy driving it. Why not at least a Honda?

A car is an appliance. Why does it have to be fun?

It's a moving chair that gets me from A to B

Re: Carmakers feel chip crisis easing

#152

Post by ChrisRR »

colechristensen wrote: post #44
csours wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I work for GM. Anything expressed here is solely my own opinion and experience. I think each statement is true. Context: for ages, OEMs (the factory) have had a belief that Americans will not wait to buy a car. There's also a bit of a prisoner's dilemma: if any automaker wanted to trim inventories, the customer could go to a competing automaker's lot and buy today. Since customers will not wait to buy a c…

I was seriously looking to buy and stopped when I was quoted a 9 month delivery time. Also, what is the point of a dealership if you have to wait a very long time and have no negotiation leverage? They might find they regret their temporary boost of profits when it destroys them. Ford is selling EVs direct to consumer now, the writing may be on the wall for dealerships.

> Also, what is the point of a dealership

Because the US has a law that prohibits direct sales and must be made through a dealership. Presumably some middle man bribed their way to creating that law

Re: Carmakers feel chip crisis easing

#153

Post by cushychicken »

krasin wrote: post #22

I have a hobby around electronics, and as a side effect, I have been keeping CSVs with all the components from JLCPCB Parts library for the last 6 months. It appears that we're slowly crawling out of the pit: date,in_stock,out_of_stock,in_stock/total 2022-06-06,185324,173101,0.517051 2022-06-05,185116,173227,0.516589 2022-06-01,184845,173355,0.516039 2022-05-28,183850,173676,0.514228 2022-05-21,181201,175377,0.508167…

Hey that's very neat! This would be a fun thing to visualize as a webapp - even a single page that loads into a JS graphing library would be neat.

Re: Carmakers feel chip crisis easing

#154

Post by MisterTea »

flyinglizard wrote: post #133
argonaut wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for frugality, but with a newer car you're getting vastly improved crash safety. Over the years crash safety ratings have gotten tougher and tougher. You can browse the IIHS crash rating history for the Camry (or any other car) and you can often observe that when the IIHS introduces a new test, cars often perform poorly on it (high likelihood of injury) initially, but get better later on. https://www.iihs.org…

And also active safety driver aids which prevent accidents in the first place. If you can afford a new car, by all means you should.

Most of the safety driver aids seem to paper over incompetency and the fact that people can't put their phones down while operating a deadly vehicle. Been driving for 20+ years and no accidents. I also mainly drive older vehicles without any such tech save for ABS. Stay focused on the task at hand and be responsible. If you cant do that, then surrender your drivers license and use an alternative transportation method.

Re: Carmakers feel chip crisis easing

#155

Post by magicalhippo »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #94
markus_zhang wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pico is still available, even in Canada.

I am freshly obsessed with the RP2040 chip, last time I checked Digikey had like 90,000 in stock at 1USD a pop. I am really curious to what extent it could be configured to do the job of many of these out-of-stock chips that the car industry is hurting for, perhaps straight up emulate their I/O ?

Keep in mind that microcontrollers is just one of the type of chips that the car industry, and others, are lacking. Supporting ICs like power management/voltage regulators, opamps, ADC/DAC's, motor/bridge drivers, interface ICs like CAN bus drivers have all been massively out of stock.

That said, as I understand it, a lot of the automotive microcontrollers are either specialized or they're part of an approved design. So switching them out is not trivial.

On top of that it's the case of not being automotive grade as mentioned already.

Re: Carmakers feel chip crisis easing

#156

Post by colechristensen »

ChrisRR wrote: post #152
colechristensen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was seriously looking to buy and stopped when I was quoted a 9 month delivery time. Also, what is the point of a dealership if you have to wait a very long time and have no negotiation leverage? They might find they regret their temporary boost of profits when it destroys them. Ford is selling EVs direct to consumer now, the writing may be on the wall for dealerships.

> Also, what is the point of a dealership Because the US has a law that prohibits direct sales and must be made through a dealership. Presumably some middle man bribed their way to creating that law

The US doesn’t have that late, some states do, and it was out on at a time where the thought was to protect the downtrodden dealers

Re: Carmakers feel chip crisis easing

#157

Post by lovemenot »

cormacrelf wrote: post #105
CameronNemo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope an electric car model will take up the mantle for reliability and repair ability. Toyota is lagging hard in the EV space. Maybe those Chevy Bolts will last a while? Or the Kia EVs? Probably the F150s, but I'd prefer a compact.

I have more hope for EV repairability than for e.g. iPhones. Notice that right-to-repair laws followed tractor owners, not iPhone owners. The farmers felt the pain first. It's simply more important for a vehicle, where replacing is not nearly as cheap. You can already buy random EV parts online. As automakers make more models and source more common parts for their cars to do this competitively, this aftermarket gets…

I hope to see the next Mad Max movie as a visceral depiction of a wind, solar, geothermal, BEV, desalination tribe defeating the carbon tribe.

In replay of the recent election in Aus.

Re: Carmakers feel chip crisis easing

#158

Post by voidmain0001 »

RyanShook wrote: post #2

I saw an article recently saying that dealerships and car makers want to keep inventories low because they like the post-covid margins they're experiencing. When I paid 5k over msrp a few months ago the salesperson claimed they wanted more inventory because salespeople were unable to hit the volume goals they have. Not sure who to believe but I'm sure the truth lies somewhere in between.

I work in retail automotive in Ontario, Canada. It sucks to read that you paid over MSRP. The province of Ontario has a governing body called OMVIC that doesn't allow sales of new vehicles for > MSRP/sticker price. That said, not all OMVIC registered dealerships abide by that policy, but I do know the one I work for adheres to it. All told, dealerships are making the same amount of gross now as they did prior to the pandemic, if not more thanks to full margin sales despite lack of volume.

Re: Carmakers feel chip crisis easing

#159

Post by ineedasername »

csours wrote: post #8
RyanShook wrote: post #2

I saw an article recently saying that dealerships and car makers want to keep inventories low because they like the post-covid margins they're experiencing. When I paid 5k over msrp a few months ago the salesperson claimed they wanted more inventory because salespeople were unable to hit the volume goals they have. Not sure who to believe but I'm sure the truth lies somewhere in between.

Disclosure: I work for GM. Anything expressed here is solely my own opinion and experience. I think each statement is true. Context: for ages, OEMs (the factory) have had a belief that Americans will not wait to buy a car. There's also a bit of a prisoner's dilemma: if any automaker wanted to trim inventories, the customer could go to a competing automaker's lot and buy today. Since customers will not wait to buy a c…

OEM's and dealerships make a very large amount of their profit on parts (OEM's) and repairs (dealerships). And both make money on financing.

This is especially true for dealerships. Sure during a shortage dealerships are happy to sell limited inventory at much higher margins but in the long term that's going to eat into their bottom line. Financing alone often surpasses profits on the car itself. Then also fewer people will bring their cars in for scheduled maintenance and get their cars fixed during the warranty period. After that a lot of people get their cars fixed at less expensive 3rd party repair shops.

A family member worked in the industry for years and conveyed this to me, but it's also what the sales manager told me when I bought a new car recently: No one was happy. Salespeople made fewer bonuses hitting quotas and the dealership's long term profit forecasts were way down, even if current profit margins made short term profitability the same or slightly higher than usual.

Re: Carmakers feel chip crisis easing

#160

Post by voidmain0001 »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #12
csours wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I work for GM. Anything expressed here is solely my own opinion and experience. I think each statement is true. Context: for ages, OEMs (the factory) have had a belief that Americans will not wait to buy a car. There's also a bit of a prisoner's dilemma: if any automaker wanted to trim inventories, the customer could go to a competing automaker's lot and buy today. Since customers will not wait to buy a c…

>Dealerships hate carrying extra inventory because it costs money to finance the vehicles until they sell them. Note that with interest rates having been really low, even negative in real term, an inventory was almost a good investment with relatively good returns (if you could get your hands on it). Now with rising interest rates and falling inflation, the cost of financing might become a burden again.

The bank rate to the dealership to carry its floorplan is much higher than the posted rates. Yes, being able to carry inventory during the pandemic is advantageous but otherwise dealerships work hard to not having a vehicle older than 180 days as they become undesirable to consumers.
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