by jchrisa on 4/23/21, 4:51 PM with 327 comments
by pradn on 4/23/21, 7:17 PM
> After the [Fukushima] catastrophe severed Toyota’s supply chains on March 11, 2011, the world’s biggest automaker realised the lead-time for semiconductors was way too long to cope with devastating shocks such as natural disasters.
> That’s why Toyota came up with a business continuity plan (BCP) that required suppliers to stockpile anywhere from two to six months’ worth of chips for the Japanese carmaker, depending on the time it takes from order to delivery, four sources said.
> The sources said Toyota has another advantage over some rivals when it comes to chips thanks to its long-standing policy of ensuring it understands all the technology used in its cars, rather than relying on suppliers to provide “black boxes”.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversa...
by bluesquared on 4/23/21, 5:18 PM
I'm a hardware engineer for a medical device company, and we've been dealing with supply constraints not only with our MCUs but other ICs like high-side power switches, LDOs, memory, and more. It's tough when we're low volume (a few thousand a year) and the huge automakers and other huge consumer electronics giants are gobbling up all the parts.
by aazaa on 4/23/21, 5:23 PM
It's fascinating that the response is to close production rather than increase prices.
Those warning of inflation point to events like this as support. But inflation requires that higher producer costs be accepted by consumers.
And for that price transmission mechanism to work, there needs to be supply actually available at the higher price. It appears that just-in-time economics mean that in the event of a shortage your supply just goes offline. You don't get higher prices, just empty shelves.
by UI_at_80x24 on 4/23/21, 6:48 PM
In another version of my life I was a truck-driver bringing parts to Ford/Chrysler/GM/Honda/Toyota on a daily basis. I've done this for many trucking companies, and the warning/threat that you get at 'orientation' (aka training for 15 minutes) is the same for all of them:
GM Charges us $24,000/hour if we are late for our window by more then 15 minutes.
I'm sure the other automakers had similar threats, but I only ever heard it about GM.
by MangoCoffee on 4/23/21, 7:09 PM
https://www.benzinga.com/news/earnings/21/04/20771098/tesla-...
Tesla doesn't seem to have a chip problem.
this whole auto chip shortage is auto maker's own f'ck up
by pmichaud on 4/23/21, 4:57 PM
by mmmBacon on 4/23/21, 5:56 PM
To me this seems like auto industry trying to shift blame away from their supply chain management to their vendors.
by jacques_chester on 4/23/21, 7:38 PM
This idea has gotten a lot of play lately. But the unstated alternative is to somehow perfectly forecast future demand for parts. That's very difficult in general and doubly difficult during a global pandemic. And, in fact, well-practiced lean outfits are better at knowing which inputs are potentially most disruptive, because they already obsess over lead times for everything.
Without lean practices you just wind up with giants piles of almost random inventory. That you'd have wound up with a giant pile of CPUs is a total crapshoot. But you would absolutely positively have a bunch of stuff you don't need and never will. And that inventory would choke the whole company to death.
The whole idea that JIT destroyed some glorious, flawless past is the Nirvana fallacy. "Oh, supply chain disruptions happen at all, therefore JIT is entirely useless". It's just a silly idea and needs to be mocked at every opportunity.
by dpedu on 4/23/21, 5:28 PM
by whereis on 4/23/21, 5:49 PM
My late model American vehicle is my home. Earlier this week, the locks kept popping open when I was trying to go to sleep. Nobody else besides me has a remote entry key.
by hinkley on 4/23/21, 5:02 PM
If the AC and the power seats and the cabin lights used the moral equivalent of a raspberry pi compute engine, would we see supply harder to disrupt, or massive consolidation that just makes these problems worse, for instance every single car plant shutting down for two weeks out of the same three months as the pause wends its way through the supply chain. Today a Chevrolet plant gets the only truckload, but Ram doesn’t run out until tomorrow due to transit delays.
by hda2 on 4/24/21, 1:11 AM
ICs, like electricity, are indispensable to modern life. They're availability must be secured and protected in the same way.
by Zenst on 4/23/21, 9:27 PM
But not ideal. Though all that, I wonder if this was a perfect storm and with the increases and demands for all things smart, it may be that we are playing catchup with a moving goalpost for a few years yet.
by intergalplan on 4/23/21, 5:36 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_variants_of_Soviet_mili...
I first encountered the idea of "Monkey Models" in Suvorov's book (referenced on that page).
The TL;DR is that the Soviets would design their equipment with the best high-tech sensors, weapons, countermeasures, et c., that they could reasonably manage, but also design the equipment to function with much simpler parts & manufacturing processes. So a high-tech Soviet tank might have an electronic targeting system, but also be designed to work with a simpler glass-and-steel rangefinder that could be built with relatively simple tools, in a half-decent machine shop shed. They might fit their best models with advanced armor plating, but design a variant that replaced all that with a little extra steel. They'd do this with practically everything, including aircraft.
Why? Multiple reasons: 1) it let them export "new" equipment to allies and puppet-states at a lower cost and in much greater quantities, by selling them "monkey models" with much of the high-tech gear & parts swapped for low-tech counterparts (older generations of top-end gear would be sent to the closest allies/puppets or, more often, to domestic reserve units, in a kind of tiered system), 2) since most of the Soviet gear the West encountered was in direct or proxy wars with Soviet ally, client, or puppet states, the West couldn't gain much insight into the actual capabilities of modern Soviet equipment, 3) so-equipped allies would be starved of gear that could threaten the actual Soviet military, in case they became adversaries, 4) less-advanced allies could more easily maintain gear without so much high-tech junk in it, and 5) perhaps most importantly, it gave the Soviets a kind of supply-line defense-in-depth—they had not only designed these weapon systems so they could be built (as weaker versions) without high-tech manufacturing, but practiced doing it. In the event of a shooting war with, say, the US, the Soviets could keep shipping (inferior, but much better than nothing) tanks & aircraft to the front lines even if all their high-tech facilities were bombed out of existence and they lost access to advanced materials (say, high-tech armor material), with hardly a hiccup.
by devwastaken on 4/23/21, 5:10 PM
I wonder if anyone has documented the various sensors and algorithms used for basic vehicle functionality.
by AtomicOrbital on 4/26/21, 2:19 AM
by eloff on 4/23/21, 6:28 PM
That was a multi-billion dollar, very bold and risky bet that paid off. How many car companies do you know where they decided to take on industry leaders like Nvidia and Intel and actually produce a better product? That's really quite remarkable.
If GM said tomorrow that they were going to build better machine-learning chips than Nvidia, we'd all get a good laugh at that.
by ArcFeind on 4/23/21, 5:49 PM
by reactspa on 4/23/21, 8:27 PM
I thought the threat to Taiwan (from China) was driving that.
But buried in the news was that Tata was going to build a chip-fab in India.
Tata owns Jaguar Land Rover.
by gumby on 4/23/21, 5:42 PM
Allegedly you can bring up a fab large node (still sub micron) in just 4-5 months -- there's a lot of surplus / used gear out there, but will anyone bother (try might not earn back your cap ex).
by ArkanExplorer on 4/24/21, 1:04 PM
Could Land Rover petition the UK Government to ban the exchange of Proof of Work coins in the UK in order to alleviate this chip shortage? Mining activity is a function of the price of the coin, and even bans from minor economies like Turkey have been enough to decrease prices.
by deevolution on 4/24/21, 5:06 AM
by protoman3000 on 4/23/21, 5:49 PM
by seomint on 4/23/21, 7:31 PM
by Kye on 4/23/21, 10:51 PM
by avmich on 4/23/21, 8:04 PM
I'd buy a simpler car instead of having no car any day.
by foobar1962 on 4/24/21, 5:01 AM
It sounds like Toyota is placing two orders: one for now, and one for Ron.
by pbreit on 4/23/21, 10:42 PM
by dvh on 4/23/21, 7:33 PM
by speedgoose on 4/23/21, 5:20 PM
by beiller on 4/23/21, 5:29 PM
by kolbe on 4/23/21, 11:44 PM
by throw7 on 4/23/21, 5:51 PM
by jonvk on 4/23/21, 7:11 PM