Rash of parts thefts is leaving Freightliner trucks inoperable

So how long does the microchip shortage continue?

Warning: Paid Pessimist point of view (I've done computer security for far, far too long).

Indefinitely. It doesn't recover. Because (modern, leading process) microchips are the sort of globe spanning supply chain problem that works great, right up until it doesn't. Coolant for some laser is made in this country that's at war. Some critical surface processing chemical is made by that company that had a major power outage and their facility caked up with goo that has to be scraped out. Some semiconductor fab has a worker shortage. Or a water shortage. Or got blown to pieces when some other country tried to invade (TSMC would be nuts if they weren't wired with demolition charges and quietly sure China knew it).

There will always be "something" that interferes with the smooth generation of chips. And there will be some supply, but not as much as people hope for, and they'll be rough around the edges, and, besides, you can't get those surface mount resistors in any quantity right now for your design. And eventually, this starts impacting the funding of the companies working on the newest, latest and greatest process tech, and they don't have the money to continue pushing forward.

We're long past the point when anyone but the most well funded multinationals can even consider a leading process tech foundry - and there are only a few companies on the planet who can make the hardware for it. The supply chain for foundries is just as bad as anything else, if you have a couple billion to drop on one.

And at some point, enough people will find workarounds that don't involve modern silicon that (at least in my arc of the future) demand will drop, so you won't be able to justify the investment in a leading edge fab much beyond the current stuff. Throw a solid recession/depression in, and consumer electronics spending is likely to drop substantially - so there goes a lot of the leading edge demand for some while.

The question, "How much damage can an efficient, just in time optimized global economy take before it fails?" has been discussed for many, many years, and the pessimistic point of view as of now would be, "Less than it's taken and is going to take in the next few years." And at some point, things like "food" and "basic energy" are more important to keep working than the latest consumer toys.

I'm entirely aware this doesn't paint a pretty picture of the future, and it certainly doesn't involve us going to the stars in any quantities, outside perhaps some token boots on Mars. But it's the sort of ragged decline we've seen throughout history, and, I'd argue, that we're firmly in the middle of right now. "Rattling down the backside of the arc of empire, undergoing catabolic collapse" seems to better predict things than a lot of other mental models lately.

Playing devil's advocate: in the case of EVs, the hard part is not the motor, it's the battery. If it were easy to build high efficiency and high capacity batteries which are also small and light enough to be used on a vehicle, we'd have EVs everywhere long ago. (A second hard part is the power semiconductors, to convert the DC from the battery to variable frequency AC which can be used by these high efficiency electric motors.)