How and why covid-19 hampered the mass production of automobiles?

The novel Corona Virus epidemic has had an instant and serious impact on the globally integrated automotive industry. Prodromes include a disruption in Chinese parts exports, large-scale manufacturing interruption across the world.

Due to an upset in supplying chains, a shortage of chips was created, which enforced automobile makers to drop production. A Shortage of a very critical part known as semiconductor chips has been brought up as a key reason. Both global and Indian manufacturers had announced production circulation linked to the obtainability of chips and been feigned to apply brakes on mass production.

What are the circumstances?

A conventional component across automobiles, electronic goods, medical devices, and smart appliances is the integrated circuits (IC) chips. IC’s are the foundation of all modern electronic equipment and the chip is their brain and nerve center. The circuit is a conglomeration of all electronic components — resistors, transistors, capacitors — compressed into a small silicon chip and connected all together, to perform individual or numerous tasks.

Earlier to the covid-19 pandemic, about trillions of chips were being produced on average globally every year. That is about 120 chips per person, which would appear to a great extent. All in all only a small percentage of the global population uses high-end connected equipment holding many chips. Nevertheless, the chip shortage today has a lot to do with the epidemic and how it changes customer’s actions.

After countries by countries went under lockdown people started purchasing more and more electronic equipment such as computers, mobile phones, gaming devices as they have to stay home. As a result of the lockdown in which factories were shut down, automobiles cut down on chip purchases. This affected the supply and demand throughout the world. Now as demands for automobiles appear to be on stream, chip companies are scrambling to adjust the production and distribution of the sectors such as automobiles.

Carmaking uses chips in most of the parts of the automobile, in everything from the power steering wheel, and fuel injector sensors to the navigation system, and parking cameras. As cars are also getting additional technologies and smarter and more affiliated electronic devices and equipment today, account for 40% of the cost of a new internal combustion engine car, up from less than 20% from last two decades, chips account for a scale of this escalate.

why may not carmakers hoard up?

At the last moment, the carmakers usually kept economical account holding and depended on an electronic industry contributing chain to nurture the production lines as per the opportunity. There can be two objectives behind that:-

(1) Firstly, constant reduction in the cost of production.

(2) Secondly, advancement in the processing powers of chips.

The counts of transistors going on an increase in the IC chips have doubled every year. This fact is widely known as Moore’s Law signifies the smaller device with substantial processing speeds.

Nevertheless, plenty of the evolution in chips design exists on the non-auto edge. The auto industry undergoes and large stuck to basic chips that have the same function for years.

So, what happens nowadays?

Countries’ evidence in semiconductor production is functioning to safeguard the dispense of their chips. The Indian government also started again to make an old effort for having companies build semiconductor fabrication set-up in India or get hands-on semiconductor fabs outside India. The Center’s primary effort on making India self-made for semiconductor fabs has overall been imposed severely by the company’s request to protect inevitable expenditures with different sops.