> Any reason they didn’t do this before and are doing it only now, as a response to the chip shortage? The same reason that many things aren't done; there was

> Any reason they didn’t do this before and are doing it only now, as a response to the chip shortage? The same reason that many things aren't done; there was no pressure to do so. The pallet of MCUs available to designers was truly vast; every MCU manufacturer was happy to negotiate supply of any of a wide variety of their wares for deep pocketed manufacturers like GM. So engineers optimized their designs around that affordance. Now that affordance is gone and pressure is on to rethink designs around the new reality. That car manufacturers never appeared to have considered whether they might take responsibility for the supply of components they use at a quantity of 50-100 per vehicle is pretty astonishing. Toyota apparently had stockpiled some quantity of devices and that paid off until the stockpile ran out. This appears to be the sum total of the entire industries' contingency planning.