Hello, My son has a 2022 Prius LE AWD-e on order. According to the dealer the car is built and on a boat headed to Portland Oregon. The dealer said that due to the chip shortage some of the features such as intelligent park assist might be disabled but they won’t know for sure until they actually receive the vehicle. Has anyone heard of this situation? Manuel
Manufacturers are trying to adjust to the shortages by keeping the factories moving as much as possible -- that means building an incomplete car with the intention of adding remaining components later on by...the dealer. Wouldn't sit well with me if it was a car I was buying to be honest. The quality control measures at some random dealership down the road pales in comparison to the clean and precise work done during the creation of the car at the factory. Not to say dealers couldn't get the job done, just that it adds yet another quality control point of failure, as this effectively moves vehicle production from the factory and extends it out to the dealers.
Won’t know until the car arrives at the dealer and we know for sure if any features are missing. Should be there in about a week.
Absolutely heard of it. We are facing the same issue with big over-the-road tractors. Many of them have both front-facing radar and cameras, and now they are shipping without the front-facing radar modules due to chip shortages. We let the clients know about it, and let them decide if they still want to take delivery of the trucks or not. Every one of them wants the trucks (it's up to the drivers, after all, to hit the brakes just like it was 10 years ago before front-facing radar units). Everyone here should prepare for previously unimaginable shortages. Parts for new vehicles are behind, new big trucks are behind, and even if they were on time there aren't enough drivers for the trucks being made. So... you may not be able to get things in an expected time frame if they did show up at the ports. Couple that with ocean shipping ports in crisis modes, Asia nearly shut down due to how workers from one country used to freely cross borders to work in manufacturing plants of another country, etc. ... I'm honestly still shocked that people ask about shortages these days as if they don't have a grasp of what has been going on.
congrats, all the best! i was reading an article last night, about how tesla has been less affected by the chip shortage than other mfg's, due to their ability to use generic chips, reprogram them, and update them over the air down the road.
Speaking as an engineer, we're starting to get some reports of some mine-boggling chip shortages. We are hearing things like: "You know those 10,000 ICs we promised to deliver to you by December of this year? Well, we can't promise you'll get them until December of next year." Not all vendors are telling us these things. I'm hoping that is not because they haven't told us the bad news yet. You do your best to scrounge for a while, but after all your scrounging is done, then you have to start letting your customers know that their deliveries will be similarly delayed. Eventually factories and shipping will catch up, like they have with previous shortages (last time, a few years ago, it was capacitors). But it sounds like it will be a while until that happens.
Thank you. I just saw this more-worrying message from the big truck industry last week. This has the potential to get a lot more worse before it gets better. Which means that I hope manufacturers follow what @bisco just wrote about Tesla - using generic chips and programming them is a more solid, shortage-fighting approach to manufacturing. Granted, modern vehicles are complex (mostly due to emissions), but they aren't complex enough to require the latest and greatest chips. Modern emissions and engine systems are so alike that, really, most gasoline car/pickup manufacturers could get together and agree upon one set of vehicle controller chips for turn signals, ignitions, radar/lidar, engine management and catalyst management. Then the diesel vehicle makers could do the same for theirs. It just takes realizing that the proprietary models don't work well when shortages occur.