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Comment by dpedu | Hacker News Reader

I find it bothersome that this situation is referred to as simply a shortage without any mention of the incorrect predictions or decisions the automakers made that lead to it.

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Are you seriously suggesting something as complex as this could have been predicted with certainty? Seems like retrospective wisdom.

It isn't. If you are instantly going to reduce orders you try to reduce your own cost and save money. Some automakers said we rather order to much then to little, and those producers have far less problems.

But it's affecting everyone in electronics as far as I know. My company is not in automotive, but pretty much every lead time has exploded, prices have increased and some pieces are just not available at all.

The automakers might have messed up their predictions, but they're not disrupting the whole electronics market like that.

They actually did disrupt the entire market like that. They cancelled all their orders, causing fab capacity to be redirected to other markets, then they came back and asked for their orders back, at any price, and everyone who was already making something else switched their now fewer available slots to service the car industry. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26842924

"Just-in-time" logistics are by definition highly susceptible to disruptions. Of course it can make sense in some cases, but I've never understood it as a near-universally applied doctrine. There are serious drawbacks.

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