In 2021, the lack of cores will still afflict auto companies as they die. Research organization AutoForecast
Solutions data shows that as of September 26 this year, the lack of core has caused a cumulative reduction of 8.934 million vehicles in the global automotive market, and a cumulative reduction of 1.814 million vehicles in the Chinese market, accounting for 20.3% of the total. Affected by the general environment, many domestic models have been discontinued and out of stock – car companies cannot produce them, 4S shops are hard to find, and some car companies have even bought stock chips at high prices and delivered models that lack some parts.
In the domestic large and small industry activities and executive interviews, the bosses of auto companies faced the problem of declining sales, and they all left the pot on the lack of core.
Regardless of size, new and old car companies, the lack of core has become a fig leaf for declining sales and poor performance.
But carefully observe the market, under the general trend of core shortage, each company is affected differently. Tesla’s sales in the third quarter when the core shortage was serious increased to 73%, and Model Y was even more than 33,000 units. The sales volume of SUV became the No. 1 in the SUV market, and the Haval H6, which had been on the list for 99 consecutive months, fell behind.
▲Tesla production and delivery in the first three quarters of 2021
On the surface, as a small car company, Tesla’s annual output is not as good as a model of a large company, so it is less affected by the lack of core, but the fact is by no means that simple.
On the one hand, the output of the popular new car company is much lower than that of Tesla, but it is still affected by the lack of core, so small scale is not an excuse. On the other hand, at the recent executive meeting of the Volkswagen Group, Group CEO Diss connected to Musk remotely, publicly praising Tesla for “researching and developing new controllers to solve the core shortage problem”, which shows that Tesla It is to use technology and operational capabilities to solve the problem of core shortage.
All in all, when the objective reasons for the industry’s general core shortage are the same, the stronger the subjective initiative, the more able to resist the storm and achieve growth against the trend.
Through exchanges with industry professionals and referring to reports from overseas research institutions, Auto has found clues to Tesla’s resistance to the core shortage problem, and tried to answer the key question of “Why Tesla does not lack cores”.
The benefits of this article: global car companies are struggling to survive due to lack of cores, and Tesla excels by technology. Production sharing report “Tesla: The Most Valuable Car Company under the Wave of Global Electric Intelligentization”, the official account dialog box replied [Car Dongxi 0273] to download.
Self-developed 19 MCU rapid deployment software
In 2020, a new crown pneumonia epidemic caused severe damage to the automotive industry. The first is that factories are unable to start operations due to the epidemic; then, consumer confidence has fallen, which has led to lower car sales.
At that time, upstream chip manufacturers saw personal computers,cell phoneMarkets such as, game consoles are booming, and the auto market cannot recover quickly in the short term. Therefore, the production of automotive chips has not received enough attention. In the second half of last year, as the epidemic situation in China gradually improved, the auto industry gradually recovered.
However, industry cars made mistakes in judging market demand, resulting in an imbalance between supply and demand for automotive chips. At the end of last year, the first round of core shortages broke out.
The first round of core shortages affected many car giants including Volkswagen Group and General Motors. At that time, a car tool survey found that the chips that were in short supply in the automotive industry were mainly passive components and MCU chips.
In the whole year of 2020, Tesla’s annual sales volume is only 500,000. As a global car company, this sales volume is not huge, so the first round of chip shortage has limited impact on Tesla.
At the beginning of 2021, the insufficient capacity of upstream chip factories has not improved. In addition, there is a blizzard in Texas in the United States, and there is a shortage of power for chip factories; a fire broke out in the Renesas Electronics factory in Japan, and some production lines have been suspended… Various reasons are combined. The MCU chip has fallen into the second round of shortage.
At that time, Tesla Model Y achieved mass production and delivery at the Shanghai plant, and the increase in demand made Tesla face the dilemma of core shortage for the first time.
In the conference call after Tesla’s first-quarter earnings report, Tesla confirmed for the first time that there was a shortage of chips, and the main gap was the microcontroller chip. In February of this year, Tesla’s Fremont factory in the United States was even forced to close for two days. It is reported that the Model 3 production line at the Fremont plant was suspended for two weeks.
▲Tesla Fremont Factory
Musk said on Twitter that the shortage of parts caused the plant to close, but he did not elaborate on which parts were in shortage.
In fact, after Tesla experienced a shortage of parts supply in the first quarter of this year, Tesla’s engineering team and software team began to solve these problems.
Tesla wrote in its second-quarter earnings report: Tesla’s team responded quickly and mitigated the consequences of chip shortages. At that time, Tesla’s electrical and firmware team was designing, developing, and verifying new microcontrollers, with 19 types.
Therefore, Tesla also wrote a very confident sentence in the second quarter financial report: “In the second quarter of this year, although the semiconductor supply shortage continues, we can further increase production.”
The re-developed MCU can help Tesla get rid of the shortage of supply, but with the new hardware, what about the software?
Recently, Volkswagen Group CEO Diss invited Musk to participate online at an internal meeting and talked about the topic of Tesla’s rapid deployment of software and hardware.
Musk said: “I am an engineer, in addition to cars, I am also fascinated by the supply chain, logistics and production processes.”
Diss revealed that Tesla has responded to the chip shortage more quickly than other companies in the auto industry. Its team rewrote the software within 2 to 3 weeks, whether it is old hardware or new hardware, Tesla’s software Can be adapted.
It is precisely with these 19 brand-new MCUs that Tesla was able to maintain an increase in production in the second quarter of this year.
Four secrets exposed, suppliers are optimistic about Tesla’s future
In fact, there is not only one secret that Tesla does not lack cores. According to the research institution Morgan Stanley, Tesla has four secrets.
A few days ago, a Morgan Stanley research report was exposed on Twitter, which was drafted by Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley’s chief analyst. The report pointed out that Tesla delivered 241,000 vehicles in the third quarter of this year, which was 9% higher than the expected 222,000 vehicles. It is precisely because Tesla has the ability to avoid production suspension due to lack of cores, it has created the best quarter in the company’s history in terms of production and sales and financial data.
The report said: “Tesla’s delivery volume in the third quarter is not the focus. The point is how Tesla finds enough chips to build cars?”
▲Report released by Morgan Stanley
The report believes that Tesla can ensure supply for a total of four major reasons.
First, Tesla has strong vertical integration capabilities. The report pointed out that Tesla may be the world’s most vertically integrated OEM manufacturer, so Tesla can understand the supply chain earlier and use multiple suppliers to ensure supply. At the same time, Tesla’s price is transparent, and the price of any consumer’s car is the same, and there will be no channel premium.
This is indeed the case. As early as the first quarter of this year, when Tesla was facing a production shutdown, it had already begun to develop alternative MCU chips and firmware, and finally solved the MCU chip shortage.
Second, Tesla has the capability of self-developed chips. Tesla’s most well-known self-developed chip is its autopilot chip. Its single chip AI computing power can reach 36TOPS, and each Tesla is equipped with two chips. It is these two autopilot chips that make Tesla’s L2 autopilot function a benchmark in the industry for a long time.
▲Tesla self-driving computer
The report pointed out that Tesla’s application of the latest generation of processors to vehicles can establish a strong communication link in its supply chain.
Therefore, in the face of chip shortages, Tesla can respond quickly, and the chip team has the ability to research on its own or seek replacement chips. In the automotive industry, most companies do not have the ability to develop self-developed chips. Once there is a shortage of chips, they can only seek assistance from suppliers. Car companies have no alternatives.
Third, Tesla has a strong negotiation ability. Morgan Stanley’s researchers found that Tesla has a more ambitious corporate culture than other auto companies when they surveyed parts suppliers. At the same time, Tesla is accelerating the development of endogenous technologies, keeping many suppliers vigilant.
In the face of widespread chip shortages in the industry, Tesla’s negotiation ability can ensure priority supply to a certain extent.
Fourth, Tesla’s scale is not huge, but suppliers are optimistic about Tesla’s development. The report pointed out that, compared with traditional car giants, Tesla is relatively small and its purchaser is relatively small, so the impact of chip shortages is not obvious. At the same time, many suppliers are optimistic about Tesla’s development. Even if Tesla’s annual production scale is not large, the supplier believes that Tesla will become a “big customer” in the next few years. If a few years later, Tesla’s annual output can reach several times the current level, and if we maintain a good relationship with Tesla now, we will be able to continue to receive Tesla’s orders in the future, with more long-term value.
In the context of the “new four modernizations” of automobiles, suppliers have already seen that smart electric vehicles are bound to be the general trend of the future. Therefore, the supplier’s exploration of the automotive industry will refer to the parts required by Tesla to a certain extent. Therefore, after Tesla built a factory in Shanghai, many domestic suppliers hope to build factories near the Tesla factory to better serve Tesla and occupy a place in the field of smart electric vehicles.
Simplify vehicle components, software functions are more important
From July to August this year, global auto companies ushered in the third round of core shortages. The main reason was the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia in Malaysia, which prevented the chip testing and packaging plant from starting operations, which resulted in the failure to complete the last link of chip manufacturing. Tesla is also affected by this round of chip shortages, and vehicle delivery time has been extended. However, Tesla has its own trick-simplifying the configuration while achieving the same functions.
In the domestic market, the delivery time for the upgraded version of the Tesla Model 3 standard battery life is 6-10 weeks, and the high-performance version will be delivered in the fourth quarter. The Tesla Model Y standard battery life version will be delivered in 6 to 10 weeks, the long battery life version will be delivered in the fourth quarter, and the high-performance version is expected to begin delivery in the fourth quarter.
Car analysis shows that Tesla’s upgrade of the vehicle’s electrical and electronic architecture and simplified hardware configuration can, to a certain extent, avoid the impact of chip shortages.
It is understood that at this stage a car often needs 40 to 80 microcontrollers, plus sensors, computing chips, etc., the number of chips in the entire car may exceed 1,000, plus thousands of discrete devices such as diodes and triodes, and data Ten thousand resistors, capacitors and other passive components, the number of electronic components in the vehicle will be very high. Moreover, luxury cars and smart cars require more electronic components.
Among the many chips, as long as one is in short supply, the vehicle cannot be manufactured.
And Tesla is the pioneer in making cars easier. Tesla Model 3 and Model Y have no traditional car instrumentation or a large number of physical buttons. All information and entertainment are displayed on a central control screen. At the same time, previous media reports stated that Tesla’s first model, Model S, has a wiring harness of 3 kilometers, while the current Model Y model has a wiring harness of only about 100 meters.
Significantly simplified vehicle interiors and more advanced electrical and electronic architecture have made Tesla’s vehicle calculations relatively more concentrated. At present, only a few models in the world have upgraded the electrical and electronic architecture of domain controllers, and most of them use ECUs as distributed computing units. This has significantly increased the amount of chips and wiring harnesses in the car.
Tesla’s upgrade of the electrical and electronic architecture has allowed most of the vehicle’s calculations to be concentrated in the on-board computer (Tesla MCU 2) and autopilot computer (Tesla Hardware 3), which reduces the amount of wiring harnesses and at the same time. The amount of chips distributed in the vehicle.
▲Model Y production line of Tesla’s Shanghai factory
In addition, Tesla is also making L2 autonomous driving easier. In May of this year, Tesla’s long-established pure visual perception went online, and then Tesla cancelled the millimeter wave radar of the American Model 3 and Model Y models, and the whole vehicle only had camera perception.
The millimeter wave radar is the protagonist in the third round of core shortage.
Chess learned earlier that the shutdown of some chip factories in Malaysia has had a great impact on the supply of chips for Bosch’s ESP/IPB, VCU, TCU and other systems.
Xu Daquan, vice president of Bosch China, said in his personal circle of friends that more than 20 people have died because of the new crown pneumonia epidemic in a semiconductor chip supplier’s factory, and hundreds of people have been infected with the new crown virus in a factory with more than 3,000 people.
▲The circle of friends of Xu Daquan, Vice President of Bosch China
At the same time, the picture of Moments says “Building, 6th floor, jump or not? Bring the leader or not?” It is even more worrying.
In September of this year, ideal cars, a new domestic car manufacturer, delivered 7,094 units, a decrease of 24.8% from the previous month, failing to enter the monthly delivery mark of 10,000 units alongside Weilai and Xiaopeng. It is a custom chip in millimeter wave radar that is in short supply. This chip cannot be replaced with a general-purpose computing chip. As a result, the millimeter wave radar cannot be produced and the new car cannot be delivered as scheduled.
In fact, the shortage of millimeter-wave radar chips is only a microcosm of the large-scale chip shortage in the automotive industry. The electronic and electrical architecture is too complicated, and it is also one of the important reasons for the shortage of chips in the automotive industry today.
Facing the future, automobiles will implement a central computing electronic and electrical architecture. By then, the amount of chips in the car will continue to decrease, and we will also see smart cars with more concentrated electronic components.
Conclusion: To deal with the lack of core, Tesla is still the industry benchmark
From 2020 to 2021, although the automotive industry is facing various challenges such as the new crown pneumonia epidemic and chip shortage, smart cockpits, L2 autonomous driving, and electric vehicles are becoming the biggest growth points of the automotive industry. The “new four modernizations” of automobiles are becoming the consensus of the industry today, and chips are becoming one of the most core components in automobiles.
As the head of a new force in car manufacturing, Tesla’s innovation is not limited to the driving experience, but also has more valuable explorations for car manufacturing. Therefore, in response to the chip shortage throughout the year, Tesla did not experience scale production reductions or failure to deliver.
At the same time, the gross profit margin of Tesla Motors reached 30.5% in the third quarter of this year, which is almost unmatched in the automotive industry. This can show that Tesla is still the industry benchmark in response to the industry’s general chip shortage.
