New Vehicle Shortage to last in to 2024
- Thread starter CKN
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My guess is supply shortage.
Bullwhip effect. Either that, or maybe people are buying Porsche's because it's the only thing that they could get.
If you toss a rock into a still body of water, how long does it take for the ripples to stop?
Yeah, that's the same thing...
Semiconductor Manufacturing is a highly specialized (and expensive) process. A new wafer fabrication factory (fab) costs billions and years to put up.
When the car companies cut their orders 2+ years ago, SEMI changed over to cell and computer chip making. Cutover is a huge expense.
There was a huge fire at Renesas in Japan; they produce about 30% of the world's auto chips.
After chips are fabbed, the next step is programming the low level code, firmware, based on use. Another backlog.
It's a big deal...
Ford has taken the Tesla approach of vertical integration; they are starting to program their own chips, which allows for reuse of existing chip inventories. Tesla is the only company that programs their chips. Given they are a software company, it was natural for them to do so.
When I started in SEMI, chip geometries (trace width) was 65nm. Today we are developing 5nm nodes and beyond.
All good reasons for the US to stop relying on other countries for these products and produce them here...
Ram supply chain has been good. We get a constant supply and we sell quite a few.
And most are repeat Ram buyers.
As for quality differences, I do appraisals and I see 100s of trucks a year.
Issues tend to be apparent after 100,000 kms and 7 years in service.
What I am seeing...
The Fords turn to rust, and electrical issues will be bad after year 7. Eco-boost engine reliability is a roll of the dice.
Chevs, same thing with electronics, paint quality is pretty bad - just not durable. Brakes are expensive to do.
Ram, common issues are a $1300 job to replace an EBrake if its having a safety done, its not a regular maintenance item.
Front diff and axles tend to need replacement at 120,000 kms+.
Engine manifolds may crack, easy to hear on start up.
If I were to buy a truck today, it would be a Ram, probably a Classic, Night edition, with comfort package - V6 or Hemi are both good, just depends on my towing needs.
When is the move to picometers in the semi conductor business?
Is it possible given wavelength constraints?
I was in Costco yesterday and spoke with a manager who was loading the bottle water machine. I kidded him about the boss doing the grunt work and he proceded to tell me that they can't find workers. He said he just had a new employee quit because the PT job was cutting into his gaming time. This guy was a college graduate making $17 an hour. Neither of us could believe that he would say that publicly. Costco is a good company to work for. Good upward mobility if you show up and do a good job. Too many participation trophies if you ask me. Trex lumber has a plant here and offers $20 an hour plus benefits to start and they will pick you up and take you home even 40 miles away. They can't find people and have started putting up billboards in Spanish. P&G and Amazon recently put up big centers. When they were being built, I knew they wouldn't find enough people to pass a drug test. That was before Covid and the govt paying people to not work. We are in a crazy world right now. Up until the last couple of months, people wanted to buy things that were not available to sell. Lots of good jobs are created and nobody wants the work. BTW $20 an hour is a good wage in my area. Until the govt. stops paying people not to work, it's not going to get better.
The current climate is shifting towards onshoring to a limited degree...
TSMC (biggest chip company), Samsung and Intel are building new fabs here, but that does not necessarily mean they will fab up car chips.
There's a shortage of tech workers to fill the jobs... Education education education.
I suggest you Google up some information. It is fascinating... Chip making is arguably the most high tech of the high tech. How do you build a new whatever if you don't have the chip to power it? Kinda chicken or the egg stuff.
As we say in SEMI, "Dude, half the time I have no idea what you are talking about, but it sure sounds cool..."
In all honesty, I worked on the business side of the house, coding business solutions to automate information, analytics, sales forecast and capacity planning.
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My GF put $ down for a Toyota Avalon that was scheduled for production. We were told it would be for MSRP. When it came in the dealer added $3k to the sticker. She said forget it. This was last fall. Just recently she found a dealer in another state that had 5 or 6 Avalon XLE's equipped the way she wanted. They had $1k added to the sticker but Toyota had a $1k rebate if you financed with Toyota. She asked for an out the door price. She told them no thanks but they kept calling and she kept turning them down. **** if they didn't come back with and OTD price that was about msrp. That included 6.5% tax and all the other fees. We went over Saturday and got it. I don't know why they had several of them and nobody else did.
Interesting fact is that the dealer put a sticker on the windshield about changing the oil in 5k miles. I briefly looked at the 500 page manual and saw that the OCI monitor resets to 5k. Recommended oil is 0-20. It is a DI V-6 and doesn't have start-stop.
But by the time we reach mid 2020s the security in Asia may start becoming a problem...
True, although you left out test. After fabrication, the chip has to be tested. Typically you hit a wafer prober. You may have more than one pass at probe. Then the wafer is sliced and packaged, and tested again. Sometimes multiple test passes after packaging. Tape and reel (typically), then ship to whoever will use it--in the case of automotive stuff, it tends to go to a supplier (Aisin, Bosch, etc) where it gets assembled into a board, then that board into a larger assembly so as to make whatever (ABS controller, ECU, etc). Again with multiple test passes...
Automotive, the timeframe from concept to in-vehicle can be measured in years. Want a new IC design? It can be multiple years to get everything qualified.
One of the issues here was turnover in the workforce. New product designs require new testlists. Need people to write those... who have experience... that have to be on the floor to debug said testlist. Not sure any employer will let someone walk out the door with million dollar equipment... have to be in-office for a lot of this.
Running a production floor is one thing, keeping the lights on with new product development is another. But even for mature products there is a workforce who have to analyze what is going on. Lot yields, lot problems, lot variances, the list goes on.
Lastly... one of life's ironies: in order to test IC's you need test boards with... IC's on them.
If you thought things were expensive now... there's a reason it went off-shore.
That said, materials cost is about the same around the world it seems, it's only labor that gets cheaper. Although--pure SWAG here--I'm not sure to what effect emissions regulations come into play. Be it hazardous waste disposal or just the generation of electricity as required for manufacturing. [Wafer foundries need really good power. Lots of power, and it can't go out, otherwise you lose huge money--every wafer undergoing something is now a frisbee, and not a very good one at that.]
Spot on. From a high level, the big 3 mfg steps are deposition, etch and metrology.
Of course, this is just the beginning.
There are exactly 3 major players, Applied Materials (full suite), Lam Research (dep and etch) and KLA-Tencor (Metrology).
These are the companies who supply the wafer fab companies to build a chip manufacturing line. There used to be hundreds, now there are 3 major players and some smaller, nieche players.
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Greed is what moved production overseas. We used to make ALL of our own products right here in the states...outsourcing is not necessary...
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Well we have surpassed Moore's Law... have we not?
I remember when the Intel super-semiconductor wafer and fab site in Upstate NY was amazing tech. Pentium 3 or 4, I believe.. I know, I am a dinosaur.
I think it is still true that 80% or something if computers in the world are "Wintel" (Windows/Intel) PCs. AMD was the winner of the alternative processor wars, Cyrix came and went. I am a product of the 90s. Lesser extent 80s.
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