A car not made is a car never sold: inside the chip shortage that has got automakers in a pickle

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People visit Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) booth on August 27, 2020 in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province of China.

Synopsis
Indian as well as the global automotive industry is losing money in the billions. Reason? Not enough semiconductors to go around satiating the demands of both automakers and the consumer-electronics industry. That’s just the start of a bigger trouble. It is possible that the worst is yet to come.

Novelist Arthur Hailey’s 1971 bestseller, Wheels, is a thinly disguised take on the lives and times of executives and workers of Ford Motor Company in Detroit of the 1970s. One of the things Hailey brings out about the auto industry is its absolute obsession with keeping the assembly lines running, no matter what. Stopping it is not an option. The reason is simple enough. A car not made is a car never sold – here, time is quite literally money.

( Originally published on Mar 16, 2021 )