Ouch. Automakers were already struggling with chip supply. This is going to shut down production lines.
TBH, that is their own fault.
When the pandemic started a year ago, they chickened out thinking people won't have money to buy anymore cars and halted production, cancelling orders for semiconductors. Then, when the demand for cars exploded, since nobody wanted to be on a subway/bus full of people carrying a contagious virus, they wanted their chips to resume production, but the semiconductor fabs have already allocated the wafer capacity the automakers have just freed up to other industries that were booming.
The automakers basically sold both their kidneys to the pawnshop for a quick buck and are now trying to buy them back during a kidney shortage.
The high unemployment rate during the pandemic was(and still is) mostly formed of people working in the service industry, travel, minimum wage earners and people with little to no skills and those people were having a rough time even before the pandemic so they were never on the automakers' radar of customers would buy a new car, not in a million years. Those people can only afford to buy used.
On the other hand, the typical new car buyer, the middle classer and above, saw little unemployment, on the contrary, many have seen their best years yet, which is why the demand for new cars (among other things) exploded.
Now they know the concert is definitely on, they want their place in the line back and the manufacturers told them to pound sand, since there are tons more people paying more money than they are.
Automotive manufacturers think they have much more weight than they actually do when it comes to purchasing electronic components. They definitely came to a rude awakening when the chip fabs and manufacturers told them to go to the back of the line.
For reference, the entire automotive market in 2020 spent 38 billion on semiconductors. Apple alone spent 53 billion in 2020.
If you are going to prioritize something, who do you think is going to get special treatment?
It really feels like nobody appreciated just how critical to all aspects of our lives semiconductors have become - tiny little chips have caused heavy industry to grind to a halt in some places.
https://www.autoblog.com/2021/03/09/toyota-how-it-avoided-se...
You will be underwater for the car's entire remaining lifetime on the market.
Some place limitations on safety critical electronics like ABS specifically requiring any modification to it being treated as a new car model for legal purposes.
Such laws are predatory, but laws they are
But even if they did find cheaper substitutes, it's not the more advanced chips which are in the most acute shortage, but really old ones, which were kept in production for decades specifically because of car industry's requirements.