cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/51884177
The company’s Chinese arm has taken steps toward independence and has resumed selling products to domestic Chinese customers.
The sources said the Dutch government believes it can negotiate a resolution with China that will restore the company to a unified Dutch-Chinese structure.
Man I dunno maybe stop turning cars into computers?
Things as simple as the wiper motor in every car has some Nexperia parts under shortage. They do many types of components, transistors, diodes, that are in basic electronics. It’s not so simple to replace these parts by other manufacturers because the requirements for automotive parts are difficult to meet (normal operation between -40 and +85 °C, 15 year durability, high humidity, etc) and you must demonstrate these capability on every product to the car manufacturers before you can use a new component in the product.
This topic is keeping me working minimum 10 hours per day as of lately 🤷♂️
Do you want smog? Do you like every road smelling like burning gasoline? Then cars need these chips to run their catalytic converters.
I feel like that’s sort of dodging the spirit of the question in favor of discouraging a common layman complaint? A modern car has hundreds if not thousands of ICs beyond the 2 or 3 required to run a cat so “You’ll die of asthma without a catalytic converter” isn’t really a terribly applicable response to the “Why is my VW a tangled mess of parallel plugs, sensors, and shockingly often general purpose CPUs?” that was the energy of my [I thought rhetorical] question.
I do cede, we need at least some of them to keep these clunkers from immediately obliterating our environments and themselves. It’s just that almost all of them need not be more complex than “24 transistors in a plastic shell” that almost any nation has the capability to fab. I guess a rephrasing of my gist is “We shouldn’t rely world elite microscopic lithography facilities to make an automobile”.
That’s a valid take and ai apologise for my snippy response, I was carrying personal baggage into the argument.
Heh no worries I think I did that in a lot of my comments on here today too!
I wonder what the relationship between chip size and other costs is. You’d think a tiny scale chip like a modern cpu is more expensive to produce than larger, less fine controllers like the kind used in basic electronics but with smaller sizes comes less raw materials, lower shipping costs and you can cram more functions on the one chip. Once you have set up the manufacturing process perhaps there is an economic reason for using the fancy stuff beyond just wanting to cram the worlds worst example of a computer into the car dashboard