Yes, I’ve worked with a lot of these different tiers. The thing here is that these subcontractors are squeezed so hard on margins that lean manufacturing is the

Yes, I’ve worked with a lot of these different tiers. The thing here is that these subcontractors are squeezed so hard on margins that lean manufacturing is the only way to go. Most automotive electronics is built around COTS (components off the shelf), which means the fab are a long way away. For instance the manufacturers you’ve mention, work with TSMC for some things, but those products are certainly not the ones for automotive. Most automotive still works on 45nm. NXP announced about 18 months that they had a design for a M7 processor on 28nm (i.MX RT1170, M7 1GHz), and for most automotive vendors, this would be considered too expensive (NXP markets it for the edge computing sector). This is a far cry from the 7nm EUV processes that are slowing down the Ryzen 5000 rollout. This past month I’ve had to redesign a board myself, because we were using a component from Texas Instruments targeted for the automotive sector (a DC/DC converter). Not only have all stocks vanished, some “big client” (around my area this means automotive) has already bought the whole stock (3 consecutive shipments) until Q3. And that’s from Mouser, a distributor that for a lot of these companies, is a last resort (like Digi-key, mouser provides parts and fast delivery, which of course means that you pay a premium).