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Man - the magnitude / impact of these chips shortages on autos in particular is crazy. Regardless of Opel popularity, in the US the F-150 was a best selling ve
by slownews45 5y ago
Man - the magnitude / impact of these chips shortages on autos in particular is crazy.
Regardless of Opel popularity, in the US the F-150 was a best selling vehicle and massive cash cow and they had unfinished vehicles sitting out. These chips have GOT to be a relatively low margin / somewhat lower cost item (ie, feature size can be large). What a miss not to have more coverage for them.
- baybal2 5y ago200mm tapeouts have briefly became more profitable than leading edge ones on the wave of panic buying. On my side, I lost a lot of firmware devs to poaching by companies migrating between microchip brands, and ready to pay just anything, to the point of me myself being tempted.
- redisman 5y agoHeck, why not? It’s a market economy and we are a commodity. Why resist your price going up?
- baybal2 5y agoIt's an ultimate irony to see that 200mm fabs in the West were closed one after another for "low profitability" just to see them missing out on this money volcano
- Ekaros 5y agoIf those fabs where still around probably profitability would be even lower and there wouldn't be so massive profits. Irony is that we haven't been paying some more, to keep slack in supply.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoMind telling us whether you're hiring? And, mind pointing us to some contacts where your people are going?
- baybal2 5y agoWill you be ready to move to China? Working of physical products requires being there. We don't do much software only projects. We tried DHLing prototypes around before, it didn't work out. People still need tons of expensive tooling, go to other specialist companies with these prototypes, etc. Too much pingpong
- manquer 5y agoTaiwan would work too perhaps ? Maybe even South Korea/ Japan as well.
- asdff 5y agoAuto makers should just buy back leased cars from dealerships and harvest the chips. These are cars after all, so the chipsets have probably been the same underpowered crapware for the last ten years.
- ashtonkem 5y agoUsed car prices are so high, that would probably be pretty expensive.
- Ekaros 5y agoWould this actually ever make any sense? Not counting totalled vehicles. There really isn't so much profit in new cars price that it pays for used car fully. Unless that used car is really heavily used. Which then leads to questions of how much lifetime left the parts have.
- asdff 5y agoThey could lobby and get another cash for clunkers sort of arrangement from the federal government to incentivize dealers turning over leases rather than having them on the lot, and having the cost of getting back these cars publicly subsidized by the government. The run for used car supply right now is entirely due to new car supply being so strained. Pushing that demand back to new cars rather than used cars puts the profits back into the automakers rather than dealerships, and guess who swings with more weight in Washington. Not Joe Shmoe Chevrolet from Anytown USA.
- Ekaros 5y agoHow long longest leases are really 7 years? Is there relevant usable parts left in those vehicles? On other hand with shorter leases like 2, 3 or 5 years the cars are still perfectly functional and scrapping them would be huge waste just from environmental point alone. Simplest thing might be just to pay some part of laid-off workers compensantion.
- to11mtm 5y agoThat doesn't work in practice; there's a legal difference between a part on a new vehicle that was DIT (Damaged In Transit) and one pulled out of a lease.
- Gunax 5y agoAfter a train crash destroyed a few dozen Ford trucks, they sent an engineer who was also handy to pry the chips out of the smashed trucks. They were hand delivered back to the factory. Normally this would be ridiculous--there are many other parts that were probably more valuable. But now we have people cracking open smashed vehicles like walnuts so they can extract a chip nominally worth a few dollars.