Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022 • Hacker News Board

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#281

Post by asdff » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 10:52 PM UTC

eMSF wrote: post #145

asdff wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone driving a car thats older than 15 years old is already driving the car that OP is describing.

Is a typical new car buyer currently driving a 15-year-old car? You could say that's plausible. In a way it even makes sense, that people buy cars and then drive them for as long as they reasonably last. But if you had to, would you guess that this is how the market operates?

No, because in every product sector people have shown when given a choice and the means to make it, they'd rather buy a shiny new thing than mend an older one. We are addicted to the dopamine hit of consumption.

They aren't buying a new car on all these new widgets that might be different between one today and one from yesteryear. I bet for the vast majority of people the primary technological wants of a car are cold AC and blutooth. Everything else, your TPMS, your brake alert system that beeps like a missile is locked on when you inch too close in traffic, no one stood up and asked for any of that stuff. The market just saddled it upon us and the higher per unit cost is passed right along to us with markup.

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#282

Post by yholio » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 10:52 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #231

hutrdvnj wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalpers are not the problem as they seem, they are like market makers for stock exchanges. They buy low and sell high, always. The factory could tell you that they're currently out of stock for the next few months, but a scalper will never be out of stock, because their prices rises so high that only very few desperate companies would buy. The point is, it's better to have the option to buy something at a high price…

The way I see it, this makes sense in a hypothetical world of perfect theoretical models (you may recognize this world as being the one inhabited by frictionless, perfectly spherical cows). In this world, scalpers cause the market to price in "stickiness" - the more critical an item is to the buyer, the more they'll be willing to pay - so the supply ultimately gets allocated to the most desperate of buyers, for the p…

Scalpers perform a social service by rationing demand and ensuring availability. They don't eat the whole consumer surplus, rather, they must compete amongst themselves and the price you pay is the amount that makes client N+1 walk away if total supply is N. Some of the buyers will find that close to their margin, but others, for which the product is essential in very valuable (thus socially useful) goods or services, will thank God they have found the supply.

Think about hospitals paying 10 times more for antiseptic and performing surgeries, instead of someone drenching their driveway with that 10$ antiseptic while someone else dies without a needed surgery. By raising the price and pocketing $90, the scalper has prevented resource waste and supplied to the patient and hospital a service worth hundreds of thousands.

If a scalper becomes a monopoly, they can extract a monopoly rent and really bleed everyone dry - but so can a producer in the same situation, so the problem is low competition not intermediaries.

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#283

Post by mensetmanusman » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 10:55 PM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #205

mrweasel wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to buy a car without AC, but as it turns out that’s almost impossible. They had never imported that model without AC and the waiting time was pretty long, because they where not really built in large numbers. The models without AC mostly exist so they can produce ads saying “available from less than X“

What's the point of buying a car without A/C? You might save $1000 now, but you'll lose several thousand at trade-in time because no one else will want your car.

For driving indoors.

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#284

Post by KptMarchewa » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 10:58 PM UTC

severino wrote: post #248

minhazm wrote: post #136

Tesla has done a decent job of mitigating some of the chip shortages since they are so vertically integrated. Though obviously Tesla produces way less cars than Toyota/Honda/VW. But other manufacturers simply can't do this even if they wanted to since they outsource most of this stuff. > “We were able to substitute alternative chips, and then write the firmware in a matter of weeks,” Musk said. “It’s not just a matte…

> and then write the firmware in a matter of weeks Well, it doesn't sound very reassuring to read that they just swapped out some chips here and there and then "hacked" the new firmware in a couple of weeks. It may be the chip for the FM radio or it could be part of the breaking system.

Don't worry, they've been hacking the self driving code for a few years now.

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#285

Post by Eduard » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 11:04 PM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #246

newsclues wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until the new generation of cars with touchscreens everywhere instead of buttons and knobs for control are old.

Do you have any actual data to back up the idea that touch screen interfaces are inherently short lived?

So many smartphones with digitizers having dead zones after just four years....

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#286

Post by ashtonkem » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

Eduard wrote: post #285

ashtonkem wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any actual data to back up the idea that touch screen interfaces are inherently short lived?

So many smartphones with digitizers having dead zones after just four years....

Car screens are built to different tolerances than cell phones. In particular they must survive a much more harsh environment than most other consumer electronics. This is precisely why the first Tesla screens were so shocking in their size and so unreliable; when Elon Musk found out that he couldn’t get auto screens that large he demanded they use consumer screens, which yellowed and failed due to the heat cars are exposed to. Car screens and normal screens are not the same, at all.

This situation is exactly the same as the tractor example above. You’re taking a similar but different object built for different use cases and different financial and engineering constraints, and declaring that the outcome of one is predictive of another.

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#287

Post by hef19898 » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 11:14 PM UTC

lenzm wrote: post #220

da_chicken wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can take into account predicted difficulties. The pandemic was difficult to predict, basically everyone predicted incorrectly, and chip supply is functionally inelastic over the short term.

You don't need to know what the pandemic is specifically to plan for a global market shock. Knowing that you have a critical component with a long inelastic supply chain is enough.

And then what? Just stockpile a year of everything? At every company along the supply chain? It is the first time in my life, professional in SCM and otherwise, that something like Covid and a global trade disruption happened together with a global shortage of one class of products. No way you for see or prepare for something like that.

Hindsight in 20/20, just imagine the automotive OEMs would have gotten rid of the JIT for chips and Covid (and all the other things causing the shortages) wouldn't have affected chips but, say, certain raw materials like Aluminium.

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#288

Post by nicoburns » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 11:15 PM UTC

yholio wrote: post #282

TeMPOraL wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, this makes sense in a hypothetical world of perfect theoretical models (you may recognize this world as being the one inhabited by frictionless, perfectly spherical cows). In this world, scalpers cause the market to price in "stickiness" - the more critical an item is to the buyer, the more they'll be willing to pay - so the supply ultimately gets allocated to the most desperate of buyers, for the p…

Scalpers perform a social service by rationing demand and ensuring availability. They don't eat the whole consumer surplus, rather, they must compete amongst themselves and the price you pay is the amount that makes client N+1 walk away if total supply is N. Some of the buyers will find that close to their margin, but others, for which the product is essential in very valuable (thus socially useful) goods or services…

Governments can do this without the inefficiency of the scalpers profits in cases where the need is great.

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#289

Post by yholio » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 11:17 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #288

yholio wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalpers perform a social service by rationing demand and ensuring availability. They don't eat the whole consumer surplus, rather, they must compete amongst themselves and the price you pay is the amount that makes client N+1 walk away if total supply is N. Some of the buyers will find that close to their margin, but others, for which the product is essential in very valuable (thus socially useful) goods or services…

Governments can do this without the inefficiency of the scalpers profits in cases where the need is great.

Also known as a command economy, a staple stalinist recipe.

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#290

Post by nicoburns » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 11:20 PM UTC

medvezhenok wrote: post #241

Swenrekcah wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument feels wrong to me. If there is a market for the chip, it will find a market price. If there isn’t there isn’t. If the market is in an equilibrium and the chip manufacturer makes some money on their chips, and the chip buyers make some money on their products, the a scalper coming in and sucking up all the profit isn’t doing anybody in the world any good except themselves.

The scalpers don't suck up profit, since if there is a functioning market, you can't really scalp. Scalping exists when there is a discrepancy between a marked price and the market price of an item. If scalpers were not a thing, you would have shortages. With scalpers, you still have shortages, but you can acquire the good by paying a higher, market clearing price. That higher price either makes it so that rich peopl…

My observation is that you mostly get (1). And this is also why wealth inequality (both on a personal and a corporate level) is so bad.