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This is what I've been saying for months. Car manufacturer's chip shortage is at least partially self inflicted. By all reports the big car makers substantially cut chip orders last year due to lower sales during Covid, and probably to make their losses look better to investors.

Instead of stockpiling chips for the eventual turnaround, they put it off to make the bottom line look less nasty, and now they're crying that they can't get chips, and the chip fabs are saying 'hey, get in the back of the line, we have other orders to fill that were made last year by other customers that we have to fulfill first'. Compound that with the fact that there's a long lead time between placing orders and getting chips because the chip manufacturing process is very time consuming. The more complex chips like CPUs can take 3 months to manufacture.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021 ... p-shortage

Don't forget about acid shortages... but that applies more to CPU (tiny nano) than through hole parts.

It appears just about everyone didn't prepare for shortages, except Toyota: [url]https://jalopnik.com/toyota-prepared-for-the ... 1846641653[/url]

Toyota was prepared for the microchips to dry up. Not because it had a premonition that the pandemic was coming, but because it — along with the entire Japanese car industry — went through a similar ordeal after the devastating Tōhoku earthquake of 10 years ago. Except, unlike its peers, Toyota learned from that episode, and instituted policies that are allowing it to maintain a steady pace of production today.

I have no doubt Toyota hasn't had other issues though. I think COVID hit one of their plants and probably interrupted other supply chains. I'd hope that the US would learn and not depend on China and Taiwan to make all of our semi-conductors.

While it's good we're building some new semiconductor fabs here, it takes years. These things are more complex than oil refineries.

Also, below a certain die size, semiconductor manufacturing is a black art. TSMC (fabs here and Taiwan) is the works largest at small scale dies like our PC CPUs and GPUs, and ARM processors. They've been doing it a long time, and have it down to an art.

The larger scale dies like for chips to run your microwave, or the controller in your AC unit, that can be made in any chip fab.

RAM and NAND is another completely separate specialty, led by Micron with fabs here, Singapore and Taiwan.

true or not I been told there storage lot full of vehicles waiting on chips . when chips are avail. a whole bunch are getting program like a assemble line .as each is programed a card is tossed into the glove box . if you miss place or loss that card your screwed. as it will be the only recorded computer code for that vehicle and options installed .

That might depend on the manufacturer. I don't think they all do that.
Then there's other issues with supply chains. GM has shut down the Corvette assembly line numerous times now because Tremec (who makes the transmissions) has not been able to keep up with the demand from GM. Covid shutdowns screwed them up so GM is left waiting on them. So freaking annoying.