@Ustus

GM and Ford are laying off workers Chrysler are not far behind , Deere are still building but stockpiling waiting for chips , that’s new stuff what about older stuff with failed chips
 

There are three big chip supply problems I know about, beside the usual overlay of disruptions like when an embedded fab line caught on fire in Japan.

Car companies went all in on predictions COVID-19 would crash demand, and with few exceptions canceled part and sub-assembly orders across the board. Problem with chips? Car companies are not quasi-monopsonies like I assume they are for a bunch of their metal bending suppliers, and their fabless chip suppliers had to give up their production slots, and see below, the ones with fabs I assume used cenceled car company reserved wafers for other things. It also takes weeks to months to go from blank silicon wafer to tested, packaged chip.

COVID-19 resulted in demand for a bunch of chips of all types due to work and lifestyle changes, plus it became massively less attractive to share transportation with others so car demand went up. Car companies could not get their chip production restarted any time soon, other customers had booked the capacity they surrendered. They're not the only companies hit by chip shortages, but their initial stupidity including not realizing the implications of canceling chip orders appears to have them worse off.

Absolutely nothing can fix this in the short to medium term, the latter being new fab lines which take well more than a year to build and get running. Except maybe someone has some spare capacity like Intel in older process nodes?? But that's also not a short term solution, new parts take time for redesigns, and that's assuming Intel still knows how to make automotive grade chips, a bit like MILSPEC in temperature extremes in which they're expected to continue working.

The deep chill this winter in Texas trashed a lot of factories, from ones that make raw plastics, to one of Campbell's they just mentioned in their most recent quarterly report, to some number of fab lines. Bad things happen when there's no electricity to run the air pumps that keep fab lines clean, and much worse can happen when water pipes burst. That probably took a fair amount of embedded chip capacity out of service for a while or perhaps forever.

Aside from the last factor, nothing should have changed for spares for already sold machines, no reason the companies should have expected demand for those would drop and their usual ordering and stockpiling schemes should have continued.