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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

>What has made the auto industry particularly vulnerable is its reliance on just-in-time delivery

Invented by Toyota, ironically the reason why Japanese cars took over the industry a few decades ago

Interestingly enough, Toyota modified their supply chain operating model post-Fukushima. So the solution isn't as coarse as a binary "stockpiles or JIT", but an intelligent assessment of risk and managing that risk granularly. Kaizen at its best.

"Toyota may have pioneered the just-in-time manufacturing strategy but when it comes to chips, its decision to stockpile what have become key components in cars goes back a decade to the Fukushima disaster."

"After the catastrophe severed Toyota’s supply chains on March 11, 2011, the world’s biggest automaker realised the lead-time for semiconductors was way too long to cope with devastating shocks such as natural disasters.

That’s why Toyota came up with a business continuity plan (BCP) that required suppliers to stockpile anywhere from two to six months’ worth of chips for the Japanese carmaker, depending on the time it takes from order to delivery, four sources said."

"“Toyota was, as far as we can tell, the only automaker properly equipped to deal with chip shortages,” said a person familiar with Harman International, which specialises in car audio systems, displays and driver assistance technology."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversa...

I was under the impression it was Japanese cars' superior quality/reliability to price ratio that caused them to take over the industry a few decades ago. Just in time might allow for lower prices, but would it also have resulted in the higher quality?

The 1970's saw multiple oil crises hit the US and the smaller Japanese cars' better fuel efficiency was another big reason for their new popularity.

One way to look at it is that JIT is about reducing or eliminating "waste." A quality improvement program is also about reducing waste because reworking a bad part is wasted time and effort compared to making the part correctly in the first place.

So it's not that JIT resulted in higher quality, but an emphasis on quality across the board likely lead to JIT being implemented.

I wonder if they have spare parts to repair existing cars or if they would have taken some of their spares for new vehicles.

Chips become obsolete very quickly, and car makers create new models every year or two. You are not going to keep a year worth of inventory. Not convinced maintaining more stocks would have bought them much more time.

Automobiles don't always use the latest-and-greatest. Also: There's really no hard and fast rule next year's model must use all new electronics.

That's really not true, Car parts are heavily interchangeable. Many parts are used across generations of cars, across different models in a make's lineup, and even across makes.

It takes them 5 to 6 years to design a new model. The chips they use usually come with a guarantee from the manufacturer that they will supply it for the next 15 years.

And I believe the automotive engineers are much happier to keep using old proven parts if there is no reason to replace those. Unlike software, where every new thing will have to be done with something different.

I don’t think chips for cars become obsolete so quickly. Well, self driving hardware excluded, but the other stuff can probably run very well on 10+ year old designs.

Exactly even those will have same the chips as the regular cars. Just because you have big expensive chip and stuff for self-driving doesn't mean the other systems doesn't use standard off-the-shelve solutions like ABS and so on and on.

People just think the CPU or GPU, but what about power supply, peripherals, busses? All sorts of auxiliary stuff...

Chips aren't that expensive per-unit, and they take up very little space. It would not be cost prohibitive.

Even better, force the cost of holding to the supplier like Toyota.

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