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Comment by MangoCoffee | Hacker News Reader

“Other automakers purchase much less valuable silicon content, and become less of a priority when compared to Tesla, who designs chips in house, secures wafer supply from foundries directly, and buys chips directly from the various chip designers like NXP, Infineon, and so forth,” according to a note from Cho Research. “They don’t outsource the design of their chip stack; they in-source wherever possible and work extremely closely with their suppliers.”

https://www.benzinga.com/news/earnings/21/04/20771098/tesla-...

Tesla doesn't seem to have a chip problem.

this whole auto chip shortage is auto maker's own f'ck up

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Tesla designs mostly FSD related chips. They buy tons of other of the shelf chips like any other manufacturer.

They have stopped S/X lines, their highest profit margins models by far, for refresh. But that’s been already delayed by many months, and it’s not expected to start production anytime soon. Their metal moving volume sellers got couple of price increases in a short time.

One thing we know is that we cannot trust Tesla not lie about their production issues. During model 3 ramp up they were repeating how great they’re doing. And recently Musk acknowledged that it was such a chaos, that they were few weeks away from bankruptcy.

While Tesla doesn’t admit they are affected by chip shortage, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

I’m willing to bet Tesla runs into this in just a few months. This is coming in waves across the industry, and I doubt Tesla is equipped to deal with it any better than any other manufacturer.

(Full disclosure: I work for an Automotive OEM. I do not have any inside knowledge about the shortage in general, or how it’s affecting my company. All my comments are from my own observation of public news sources.)

Well, maybe. Here is the thing, during the peak of the pandemic Elon Musk stated that he sees everybody else reducing orders, they were not gone do that. They said they will continue to go full board ahead and put in orders expecting continuing growth over the next year.

The chip makers specifically called out the some OEM for instantly reducing orders and then instantly demand more again. Tesla didn't do that.

That doesn't scale. The reason Tesla's not having problems is because they have first dibs. That only works for them because the companies who don't have first dibs are taking the hit, not because this is some solution to the issue of shortages on the macro-economic level. If everybody did what Tesla did and in-sourced, somebody who in-sourced would be taking the hit.

Just because Tesla and Toyota did something that ended up right doesn't necessarily mean all the other auto manufacturers did something wrong. I don't the blame the other auto companies and think their actions to be prudent at the time. We have a global pandemic for the first time in 100 years where people were required to not travel and stay indoors. Seems logical to expect demand for automobiles to go down and cut back on ordering chips. Turns out reality was the exact opposite. Certainly something I wouldn't have been able to predict.

That is exactly the situation they are in. They have plans/contingency plans to make sure they don’t end up in a similar situation while the other manufactures don’t. Their plans paid off and the others’ bet not on having the plan...well that also paid off.

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