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Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

bbc.com

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Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#231

Post by xyzelement »

BossingAround wrote: post #208
xyzelement wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The fact that you can weather the extra costs doesn't mean it's "no big deal," which is how your posts comes across to me.

The point of my post was to give the OP some pragmatic advice, on the bigger-deal lever he has in his life. Obviously there's a marginal drop-off of who can afford X if X goes up even a little.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#232

Post by kwhitefoot »

ghaff wrote: post #104
brobdingnagians wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My 1965 Volvo Amazon did 300 k miles before I scrapped it, in 1984, in favour of a 1976 Volvo 245. I only scrapped it because it wasn't worth anything, it was in perfect working order. The floor of 245 finally succumbed to Norwegian road salt in 1996 after 250 k miles but was otherwise in perfect order.

I don't remember how far my 1965 Austin Mini van had done by the time I scrapped it in 1978 but I'm quite sure it was much more than 50 k miles.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#233

Post by jondwillis »

wyager wrote: post #162
yalogin wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is mostly just a reflection of the fact that the value of the dollar has declined precipitously over the last 18 months. Dollar prices are sticky, so it can take a bit of a shock for inflation to “kick in”, but we’ve had plenty of shocks to go around.

I'll add a bit of a pedantic point: the dollar hasn't really lost any value _against other currencies_ (DXY) over the past year. In fact, it is a little higher.

It has lost value against lots of commodities and "real" goods.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#234

Post by CryptoPunk »

ghaff wrote: post #104
brobdingnagians wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Capitalism really promotes planned durability.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#235

Post by throwaway0a5e »

hef19898 wrote: post #217
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

You know a function called Supply Chain Management exists, right?

It should go without saying that there are nuances in implementation. What I'm describing here is a fundamental tradeoff of JIT systems. If you get the wrong thing delivered it throws a bigger wrench into things because you don't have the buffer. Can you make this rare enough that the amortized cost is low enough to make JIT overall cheaper? Of course, that's why everyone does JIT.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#236

Post by btbuildem »

I don't see this raised anywhere -- but what's so bad about producing fewer cars (the poor neglected shareholders and exec bonuses aside)?

It's almost as if we would need to lean into this, reducing growth and producing fewer cars would be in line with efforts to mitigate the drivers of climate change.

What if car manufacturers pivoted their KPIs and focused on making long-lasting, serviceable vehicles? Toyota is already the worldwide leader in these, as evidenced anywhere that's not smoothly paved suburbia-land.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#237

Post by ren_engineer »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #200
ren_engineer wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"silicon valley" is the name because of all the chips that used to be made here, US used to lead the world in chip manufacturing Toyota is just a symptom, every other car manufacturer and other industries are facing shortages as well. The US economy is now strangled because our supply chain got outsourced for "efficiency" that didn't account for potential disruptions

> Instead they should put a massive tariff on any chip not made in the US. Companies that invested here would be rewarded for loyalty Voters would have rewarded politicians who supported these tariffs by voting them out of office for making all their toys more expensive. Everyone likes cheaper stuff and more stuff in the short term.

voters have complained about stuff being made in China for years and if it was framed from a nation security perspective you'd get wide bipartisan support. The current chip subsidy program literally just got wide bipartisan support, it's extremely popular

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#238

Post by lotsofpulp »

caf wrote: post #211
lotsofpulp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vehicle assumptions: 200 000 km lifetime mileage 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?

If we take as given that "decent quality ICE vehicles are proven to last at least 320k km" , then after accounting for both vehicles that are less than decent quality, and vehicles destroyed due to accident, malicious damage or poor maintenance long before they reach that figure, then a fleet average of 200,000 km doesn't seem out of the question.

The same factors would seem to apply to EVs (except perhaps poor maintenance, but I am not knowledgeable enough about EVs to be sure), so for the purposes of comparison, I figured apples to apples would be comparing expected lifetimes of both assuming they are not abused or neglected.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#239

Post by bob33212 »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #195

What are the barriers here? As sophisticated as automobiles have become I don't see them needing bleeding edge 5nm fabs. My bigger question is: Why is there not a thriving "small business" chip fab industry?

In theory you could wire up an old pentium or 386 and program it to do the same thing some of these chips do but you have the same problem there. No on has a 5M supply of 386s just sitting around in good condition.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#240

Post by bluGill »

gameswithgo wrote: post #97
dd36 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Toyota invented not doing that.

Chips are small, don't age fast. Make sense as an exception to the rule.

Chips also go out of production suddenly (with only a couple years warning - which isn't anywhere near enough time to replace them all). thus any major manufacture has stockpiles of chips that are no longer in production that need to last until production of the widget switches to new chips and have enough left over as spare parts for existing widgets.
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