Auto companies use older generations of chips than is cutting edge by roughly 5 years of delay this is because newer chips, while more powerful, are less vetted and therefore probabalistically less reliable this reduces their risk of recall and increases their ability to guarantee the delivery of a quality vehicle
after all, when an entire series of car is discovered to have potential to malfunction, the entire line must be recalled and the issue must be corrected
this is as opposed to say in smartphones, which use relatively newer chips because the benefit-to-risk ratio is a more appealing option to their manufacturers what this means though is that because automakers use older chips, they have to specifically order those chips from semiconductor manufacturers in order to get them to continue producing a steady stream of outdated chips in high volume the reason for the shortage thus is not necessarily because there isn’t enough semiconductor production capacity all-around but instead because when covid hit automakers assumed that nobody would buy a car during lockdown so everybody curtailed and canceled their orders for these older auto-chips in anticipation for a sharp drop in supply
but then the world basically dealt with covid in a little over a year, which was faster than anybody anticipated and now automakers are having to compete against each other for access to these old chips with extremely low supply while semiconductor manufacturers are attempting to re-ramp production and supply back up to previous levels
meanwhile, because tesla was supply-constrained and not demand-constrained to begin with, they never canceled their orders in the first place
so they still had their supply of older chips locked in for a good stretch of time
however, on top of this guaranteed short-term supply, they also are the only automotive company with the real technical prowess to feel comfortable enough to retask their r&d division to adapting their software to use of newer, less-vetted chips, like the ones which go into smartphones
the result is that tesla has leveraged their superior engineering capacity in order to accept higher risk than the more risk-averse traditional auto companies in order to continue their push towards volume production
while traditional auto companies are left to fight each other for scraps in order to keep from having to accept the risk of attempting to rewrite their software and use newer chips.
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