Once they crash the car and build the car to conform to the regulatory framework - the manufacturer of the parts in the car can't change. You must use the same Nippon semiconductors etc.
That's the simple explanation I was told.
But its probably that there is just no alternatives on the market, since Ties Ones have extensive supply chain management with second and third sources for the majority of semiconductors.
1: https://www.zvei.org/en/subjects/mobility/product-process-ch...
E.g. when the AKM plant recently burned down this already was havoc for a lot of audio applications. I'd guess that at least 15% of all cars in the >35kUS$ range use one or more AKM ICs. Unless car manufacturers (or their suppliers) have enough stock of AKM ADCs and DACs (or assembled ECUs), they have to either stop delivering they're more expensive cars - or adapt their hard- & software to use other ICs (or get questionable stock at inflated prices, which might be an expensive option if you're building millions of cars, and expensive again if those IC have a higher failure rate due to bad storage/being recycled/...). With the tendency to do as much as possible as jit, I doubt they can bridge the duration until the production ramped up again.
*) Regarding settings, I'm a opponent to "control every little thing with the touch screen" and don't buy cars with this safety hazard. However, I can adjust the a lot of "offline" settings in mine. Toggle adaptive head lights, lane departure warning sensitivity, registered keys, and a many more features one does NOT change during driving.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_part_approval_pro...
I used to work at a kiosk manufacturer that would do the complete hardware design, fabricate it, put it on a truck and drive it around the city for a week straight, and then make sure nothing was broken. This was to ensure that it wouldn't break during shipping to the customer. After that, not even a zip tie was allowed to be changed.
In our case, our development process was such that the software engineers didn't get ahold of it until afterwards. One time we built a machine with an internal cable that was too long and so its baud rate was too slow to perform to the customer's spec. Rather than incur the cost of re-testing with a different cable, the company spent two years trying to get the customer to accept a slower machine. Fun times.
I'm guessing one advantage Tesla has over traditional automakers is their entire company has been built around the existing regulatory environment. I'd be willing to bet their recertification process is quite streamlined compared to companies that have iteratively patched it on to their tradition vehicle design processes. Just a guess though; I have no background knowledge on this topic.
I highly doubt that the traditional carmakers are slowed down by regulations.
Would be cool to find someone who has actual insights to ask this.
You can generally tell what revisions are straight-forward to certify and which are not by noting common year-to-year changes in a model.
The recall I can find is to replace 3 bolts that can corrode due to salt which would cause loss of power steering.
I’m not sure what runaway power steering is?
It's 100% a design fault, and applies equally to any car of this model (I tested it on a friends, same result!). There are simple reproduction steps which can totally happen by accident, yet there has been no recall or service bulletin issued.
I ended up pulling the power steering controller apart and adding my own safety circuit to the microcontroller output so my car is now the only car of this model which won't break your thumbs or steer you into a ditch!
I've noticed that automakers are about 60 years behind aircraft makers in design methodologies that prevent things like hardovers due to single component failures.
I'm not exaggerating about the 60 years thing. I worked in Boeing engineering 40 years ago and the "no single component failure causing a crash" was the rule and literally the law.
(A lesson Boeing had to relearn with the 737MAX MCAS system.)
Nuclear reactors (Fukishima) and drilling rigs (Deepwater Horizon) are far behind, too.
So park the car for a few months, then go to unpark it on a cold night... Not at all rare!
(I work in a regulated environment, but not automotive, and we run into the same barriers, often for even minor changes. We work agile, but changes will get released in planned batches every few months, rather than shipping instantly. For automotive, I'm guessing their update cadence would be every model year.)
Building things which can have small defects that kill people is just a different game.
E.g. there are these additinonal brake lights one could place at the top of the rear window. For a long time it was illegal to use them, even if you just glued them on the inside
Obviously, if the aftermarket product puts other people at risk, then the consumer who did the modification would be legally liable
[1]: https://www.carscoops.com/2020/09/the-tesla-model-y-has-biza...