Our ancestors also built cars without anti-lock brakes and air bags. Many of them didn't survive using them.

Ford Pintos for all!

> Our ancient ancestors had a means of building cars without computer chips. I wonder if this lost technology can be re-discovered, and greatly alleviate these economic woes.

Cars, like everything else now, are mostly made to be data collection devices. You can't collect data on every possible thing without lots of chips, man. Get with the program. How is the AI going to simulate us once it wipes us out if it doesn't collect every possible datapoint it can now? Come on. It's like you don't even WANT humanity to sacrifice itself for the betterment of the universe!

You should show them the way by example. Mail in your opinion on the subject to a newspaper editorial column, instead of using the newfangled computer on the internet. The way our ancient ancestors used to.

Cars without computer chips suck. That means no infotainment system, but more importantly, it means a *really shitty unreliable car* just like they used to be: what's wrong with it? No OBD to find out. Incredibly inefficient cars that waste fuel on every cycle because the fuel injection system isn't tuned

Microcontrollers are used to reduce weight. Instead of a thick bundle of wires going to the door locks and power windows and power mirrors and door open switch and any lights that happen to be there - you have a couple of data and power wires going into the microcontroller unit that controls all the door stuff.

This goes for everything electronic, and there is a *lot* of this stuff in modern cars. Tail lights, rear climate and entertainment controls, radar parking aids, tire pressure monitors, heated seats, cabin lights, cabin temperature sensors, microphones, etc... Overall weight savings are in the dozens of pounds.

This is all done to drop weight to make CAFE standards. You could standardize on a different microcontroller, but these things are purpose-built and a full environmental TA soak can take years. You don't want one of these things to fail and have to tear doors apart to replace them in a recall.

I seriously doubt that it is technologically possible to build a car without computer chips that would meet the various legal, emission and safety requirements to sell in the US.

We still make them for vintage/hobbyist things.

They're awful. You need to actually manually tune them every time you start, and change the setting as engine warms up to ensure approximately correct mix is fed to the engine and so it can generate power appropriately. Ever heard of a "choke"? As someone who had a car with manual choke, let me tell you about amazing adventures of starting it in the winter.

And by amazing adventures, I mean utter shit show.

Those engines are really easy to make. No one but classi

There is a solution that is simple, elegant and wrong.

Our ancestors cars polluted to the point where you couldn't see the city skyline and were only affordable to drive because of oil and gas prices that are unimaginable today. Computers don't just make your phone play music through your car radio dude. They make your car do what you wanted to do and what you needed to do.

This is before the reams of safety functions built into the computer especially for big honking SUVs that tend to tip over

None of the purely mechanical automobiles would be able to pass modern emission tests or meet mandatory safety equipment standards. The solution to chip shortages is building foundries, and not necessary ones that capable of most advanced process, locally for the purpose of national security.

While your post is tongue in cheek all modern cars do worry me about parts lock in when they are out of warranty. In theory BEVs should be pretty simple but in reality they are currently just as bad as modern ICEV. Aptera look to be the most open of the bunch but until they are in production that doesn't mean much.

If you ignore the complications of global safety regulations and just looked at what it would take to make a practical BEV it could be done with common interchange parts using open source des

The ironic part is that ASML is a dutch company. The most advanced lithography process is created in the Netherlands, but its just not economical to *make the chips* there.

I think what people are referring to is Second Sourcing of parts. Part of the reason that AMD got access to the x86 instruction set is that IBM insisted that there be a second source for all the intel chips in in their PCs, particularly the CPU

For the long term, if the EU doesn't have the ability to create and build chips within their own borders, they'll always be in a position where their economies are at risk.

China was rather boring until someone learned the definition of tariff. Remember a year ago when things were boring and running smoothly? Pepperidge Farms remembers.

It's interesting that China is purportedly able to turn the US-led embargo of high-end processors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment into a strength that encourages it to speed along the inevitable domestic production of products that will eliminate any dependence on Western goods. However, the reverse logic somehow doesn't work for rare earths or car chips outside of China.

They're mostly retired and rich now. They sold us out.

> Retrieve all the money paid as bonuses to the people who got rid of the warehouses and installed just-in-time systems and use that cash to buy alternate chips.

They literally aren't running JIT systems. That's why they have reserves, that's why they were able to continue producing vehicles for months despite chip shipments being halted thanks to the Nexperia fight. The fact they don't use JIT is right there in the summary. There's only so many warehouses you can store stuff in.

What Americans who have never been to the EU need to understand about it is this: It is mostly like the US except everything is not as good, but the entire population pretends real hard they don't have problems and has a sense of superiority that makes American exceptionalism seem understated.

Basically if you have never been, don't bother it isn't worth it. The entire Eurozone has nothing to offer you can't get here better, cheaper, faster, and pick all three!

Eh?

There's plenty of car brained idiots in Europe, let assure you. It's just that for a variety of interesting reasons, they didn't get to win completely, bulldoze cities to make them car dependent hellscapes and then cement that with the force of law to prevent you building anything nice.

But you know instead of just being randomly angry at Europe for not completely prostrating themselves at the altar of the automobile you could just get on a plane from America and visit. You might even learn why some peopl

What actually happened is embodiment of the meme: "America designs, China builds, EU regulates".

Here EU's regulatory supremacy made bureaucrats at all levels believe that it's the bureaucrats within every organization that matter, not the people being managed by bureaucracy that actually produce things. So when confiscating Nexperia... they confiscated the HQ. The place with the company bureaucracy.

Chinese took one look at this idiotic confiscation of bureaucracy that never touched any productive parts of the company, did a "are you really this fucking retarded" double take, concluded that yes, European bureaucratized leadership is in fact fucking retarded, and simply ordered the production facilities in PRC to... stop taking instructions from HQ.

Because bureaucracy is utterly worthless without someone to actually do things they order. It's not a producer of anything. It's a necessary evil. A symbiote at best, and a parasite at worst. Which can in fact be simply cut out and replaced rapidly, as long as productive parts of the company remain, because there's plenty of comparable symbiotic systems out there. But there are very few if any producers.

> The consequences were not well thought out.

Actually it seems the consequences were every bit as everyone expected which is why there is a move to work to reverse it in the first place. By the way there was good reason to do what was done. Since the Nexperia takeover a *LOT* of shit has been uncovered about how China was undermining western chip production.

Literally every piece of electronics in modern cars talks on the CAN bus. In the old days your headlight switch ran 12 volts directly to them. Today the LED drivers get their on signal from the CAN bus.

> Europe has a few fabs around that definitely can do at least 90nm parts.

While I wonder if that's actually true, it wouldn't help. Nexperia, the supplier at the heart of this debacle, makes power and analog stuff: GaN FETs, bipolar, power diodes, etc. These aren't ECU MCUs. They're big power devices, using specialized materials: silicon carbide and gallium nitride, for example. You can't make these in just any old 90nm processor fab.

It's great to see all this. Consequences of the the romper room mentality of EU technocrats and citizens dwelling under the umbrella of secur