Bring back carburetors!

 

Yabba dabba doo...

 

No chips there!

 

My understanding is, the new Mustang Mach-E has more than 3,000 chips. Teslas can have as many as 8,000.
Car manufacturers cut forecasts dramatically; the chip foundries (TSMC and Renesas are the biggies) switched production.
The car market bounced back quickly, which left manufacturers with their pants down.... Oops.
Renesas had a big fire; TSMC had to deal with a flood.
Change over from one chip type to another can take months. New fabs are focusing on smaller tech node, which is not appropriate for autos.
By the way, a new wafer fab costs $10M to $15M to build and takes 1.5 years.

There is much more, including political issues; I will not get into specifics.

 

You probably meant $10-15B with a big B for a new wafer fabs. Semiconductors are the single most high tech manufacturing centers in the world and extremely difficult to startup and run. Much much much harder than autos.

 

There aren't enough roads for all these cars. As a society we need to start using public transit and bikes more. More cars is not the answer especially in cities. 😄

 

Agreed 100%, this is why I welcome rising car and fuel prices. Half the people would be better off using public transportation and should be saved from themselves.

 

Some of the manufactures are already reducing their chip use. General Motors removed Auto-start stop from their trucks to reduce the need for these chips. I agree with you MM

 

They could design circuits where one chip is responsible for a multitude of operations instead of using thousands of individual chips. The reason they are using so many chips is partly to make it more difficult for independent shops to provide repairs, they encode each part with vin number that only the dealer has the equipment to program. May be a blessing in disguise if the shortage persists.

 

I'm tempted to cash in and put my truck on the market for $42,000 but I love it too much and would just have to find another.

 

who does this, germans? Toyota certainly does not.

 

Yeah I saw that too. Good, start stop is the worst thing ever. Hopefully you could manually disable it before.

 

Can't talk to the extent, but to some extent everyone is doing it. Car wizard talked about LS460 he couldn't repair brake cylinder because of this for instance. I have a mercedes metris for my business, and the driver was carrying some metal tubes that slid and broke AC control panel. Bought the new panel, plugged it in but it wouldn't turn on - hard to be vin coded at the dealer, ~$400 for min 2 hours labor. It's little wonder they put 5 cent chips into every little part with encrypted vin code.

 

Short of programming the keys, independent shops are still able to do most of this work. They just need to have the right software.

The real reason manufacturers use so many chips has more to do with their lack of vertical integration. They buy modules from suppliers (i.e. safety systems) and have to make them all talk to each other (i.e. safety systems to brakes, instrument cluster, etc.). Prior to the pandemic manufacturers were already talking about writing their own operating systems to standardize and better integrate all of the various systems in their cars. Volkswagen publicly said their Arteon (depending on options) could have up to 70 different control units operating with software from 200 suppliers with them all needing to be networked.

 

Why does this only seem to be an issue with automobiles? Everything else pretty much is super complex these days, too.