It Ain’t The Chips
Shortages everywhere? Don’t go blaming the truckers: they are having serious problems getting parts for their OTR vehicles, never mind finding any new trucks they can buy. If anything, blame the shortages of things like semiconductor chips, as well as the squabbling going on in Congress over where those parts should come from. Since the majority are made overseas (China, Japan, etc.), this makes it a bit more clear that we are far too dependent on “other” to produce things that we ourselves can manufacture right here at home.
We aren’t quite down to brass tacks just yet, but we are getting closer.
From the article: Parts shortages are to blame for most of the lag in production. Semiconductors are likely the biggest culprit, but steel, aluminum, plastics, foam and other needed components are also hard to come by. The semiconductor shortage isn’t getting better any time soon.
According to a Sept. 29 blog post by Kelly Blue Book, the chip shortage will last into 2023. In the blog, Rohm Company CEO Isao Masumoto was quoted as saying, “All of our production facilities have been running at their full capacity since September last year, but orders from customers are overwhelming. I don’t think we can fulfill all the backlog of orders next year.”
Rohm, located in Japan, is one of the largest suppliers of semiconductors for the automotive industry.
Attempts have been made to jump-start an increase in U.S. semiconductor production with an infusion of federal cash. The $52 billion “CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives for Producing Semiconductors) for America Act” died without action in the 2020 Congress. It was reintroduced in the 2021 Congress and passed the Senate in July, but it remains in limbo as Democrats and Republicans squabble over various funding bills.
A statement on the Semiconductor Industry Association website in support of such legislation read: “The share of global semiconductor manufacturing capacity in the U.S. has eroded from 37% in 1990 to 12% today, mostly because other countries’ governments have invested ambitiously in chip manufacturing incentives and the U.S. government has not.” – article
Read the entire article at the link. It’s worth your time and is enlightening, to say the least. Since most of these items necessary for the trucking industry are made in China, which wants to take over Taiwan (déja vu all over again) because that is one of the sources of these semiconductor chips, it appears that the entire mess is not going to ease off any time soon.
The simple fact that China’s shipping industry has ships waiting offshore of the USA to unload cargo, which I addressed a while ago, speaks volumes about why demand is not being met by the supply-side people. If supply can’t get the supplies, they can’t supply any demands for any goods of any kind, whether it’s semiconductors ore tires. And the squabbling over it in Congress is an abomination, period. And yeah, I’ll blame Biden for it all because – well, because I can.
Category: "Teh Stoopid", "Your Tax Dollars At Work", 2020 Election, China
Just buy electric trucks.
$20K down delivery NLT 3/15/2025
You must be talkin about them electric-battery powered pickem-up trucks. Cuz I haven’t heard of any all electric big rigs. Somehow, I doubt pickups can make a dent in the trucking operated supply chain problems.
Tesla supposedly is developing one:
https://www.tesla.com/semi
With a max range of 500mi (presumably over flat, open terrain with little or no wind), God only knows how long a recharge time (presumably using a special type of charging station), and delivery in 3 years or so (if you’re lucky and everything goes perfectly) . . . I’m guessing they won’t be used that much for long haul freight hauling any time soon.
I suspect pulling a fully loaded trailer over the Rockies or the Sierras is going to cut that range more than fifty percent.
I’d guess you could well be right if the cumulative altitude change (including both climbing and descending) is large enough.
Electric and hybrid vehicles typically use regenerative braking to recharge onboard batteries during descent. However, this is typically <90% efficient, so there’s also some unrecoverable loss.
Further, unless the brakes on the semitrailer being towed are also electric-regenerative, they’ll likely be standard air/friction brakes. Energy that cannot be recaptured will be required to compress the air for braking, and any energy lost as waste heat in friction braking from the trailer brakes obviously can’t be recovered to charge the onboard batteries.
Are electric trucks suitable for local freight delivery? Probably. But IMO it will be a while before pure electric semis are suitable for long-haul freight. Hybrid might well be another story – and both Volvo and Freightliner (if I recall correctly) have such in development.
I’ll chip in my comment about chipping the chips to Amerika which are aboard chips at their anchorage points over on the left coast and I’ll now chip in my view that it is all Pres. Trumps fault in that if he was still in office, we wouldn’t have this chipping problem on getting the chips here. Lets get those chips out of anchorage in and chips ahoy to the merchants.
Interesting read Mi’Lady. But keep in mind, this is all part of the Master Plan by the Chinese Communists, aided and abetted by our domestic enemies, to “fundamentally change the face of America” and have world domination. The search for cheap (read slave labor) has been going on since the FIRST (ht2 Roh-Dog) Mother Ship landed and the building of the Pyramids, Aztec, and Inca Temples. And it won’t end until the Second Coming of that Former Jewish Carpenter. Slick Willy gave it all a good boost when he signed all of his “Free Trade” Acts. That huge sucking sound you heard in the mid 90s was all of the jobs leaving countries that had a stable, working, middle class going to places where 10 cents an hour was a “living wage.”
Novel idea for ya. Wanna sell here? Then you gotta build it here Save the planet! Them container ships spew out a bunch of pollutants. So do Chinese Communist owned coal fired power plants. 🇺🇸
Pay no attention to the Chicoms and Russkies rubbing their hands with glee behind the curtain:
Good one!
There was a time when Texas Instruments made their semiconductors just off the Southwest Freeway outside of Houston.
Dad worked there. They were innovators, moving away from tubes to transistors to microchips.
And, dast I say it? they didn’t need any government money to do it.
They built a much larger factory in 2019 in Richardson (North Dallas). They also bought out Micron and now make them in Utah as well as three other US factories. The Richardson factory was supported by 1% with Texas funds and a decent tax abatement.
Actually, the only thing that TI appears to have bought from Micron recently was the fab facility at Nehi, UT. Micron as a corporation still exists, is traded on the NASDAQ, and had gross revenue in 2021 of $27.7 billion (US) – which was more than $9 billion greater than TI’s 2021 revenue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micron_Technology
Micron is a memory producer; they specialize in DRAM, flash memory, and related products (SSDs) – and produce little if anything else. Their fab facilities, techniques, and patents may or may not be applicable to the current shortages in the trucking industry.
Solution in one word, tariffs. Make it part of the national security plan. Probably not gonna happen though because too many politicians and their offspring have their snouts in the Chinese trough.
Chinese trough or Chinese crotch. Since they are kissing their ass, they may as well give the Chinese a hummer, seeing as how they are in the area.
Locally we had a 710,000 square foot semiconductor plant built on 92 acres with a state-of-the-art, 100,000-square-foot clean room and equipped in 1997 for $250 million by Japan’s Matsushita Semiconductor Corp. and promptly mothballed. It was sold to Microchip Technology Inc. of Chandler, AZ for the asking price of $88 million in 2000 and then it went idle in 2003. It was listed for sale for 94.3 million.
It now houses a hand full of non-tech businesses and a medical clinic.
Chip shortage sounds, like racism, transphobia, and fatphobia to me…damn white, straight, and thin people!!!
Meanwhile Joe Biden was quoted as saying “Brphlpifblkmurk” translated by one of his handlers saying it’s all the fault of Donald Trump and Putin. Things might be better if we didn’t have people in Cabinet Positions only due to them being EO quotas like the Secretary of Transportation who was chosen solely due to the publicity about his sexual orientation!
Recently the surface transportation board held hearings with the 4 class 1 railroads. It’s almost 30 hours of testimony on YouTube but it is damning on the railroads. They are making record profits while simultaneously cutting employees and services required by common carrier laws, all in the middle of a supply chain breakdown. I love companies that make money, but doing so in this manner is simple profiteering.