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.
We did the same recently in South Australia with our last remaining steel manufacturer that the Gupta family were trying to gut.
A monthlong standoff between China and the Netherlands over Nexperia has prompted carmakers in Europe, the U.S. and Japan to warn of possible production problems due to chip shortages. Although the chips Nexperia makes are very basic, they are used in large numbers in the electronic systems of cars.
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
Would any excuse be valid if China nationalised European companies? 😑
Like they effectively did with ARM?
It’s not like China hasn’t had protectionist policies. Why do you think they don’t let google/etc. operate within the country.
I don’t feel like those two things are the same.
That’s fair, but expect to see even more of this in the future.
China historically has done a lot to protect their domestic industries (blocking access to the country, currency manipulation to keep prices cheap, required state involvement, etc.). That’s not to say other countries haven’t (US with Bailouts and Itar, etc.).
However, I would expect to see more of this across the world as globalization takes a bit of a hit. Both from rising tensions, but also from some of the fragility in supply chains exposed due to the pandemic.
So banning foreign companies entirely is more ethical than letting them compete and nationalising them when they fail or become too greater risk?
Makes perfect sense!
