Somebody at a major chip company told me that they went looking for, and found, new customers after the automotive customers canceled their orders.
So not only did the car companies ordered more than before after they realized that demand was not dropping, even if demand for them had returned to what it used to be, the total demand from other customers is now higher too.
When things go well this just in time manufacturing is lauded as a huge money saver, when they aren’t… you get now.
The business of running everything to the wire on credit and working “cost of capital” so much into business decisions gets us here.
Automotive got hit especially hard since any feature that requires electrics has the microprocessor embedded in that feature. Very cost effective-you don’t ship extra cpu power for unused features.
Tesla did the opposite though—centralized processing and over allotted cpu cycles by also made it easy to upgrade via software only.
The claim is more that they are bad planners, orthogonal from whether they use JIT or not.
They're not doing proper supply management. You can do proper supply management with JIT or without JIT. You can also do improper supply management with JIT or without JIT.
For it to be "no true scotsman" they would have to be claiming that "doing JIT" is a solution to supply management. And they're not claiming that.