Tesla purchasers, are, to some degree, buying into the idea of the brand. This works if your brand is nice and new and flashy, but I think that traditional automakers would probably suffer reputational damage if they tried this approach, and it is very hard for them to shake old reputations if they manage to get one of unreliability.
I'd say Tesla ignored that future debt, but I think it's more nuanced. I'd hazard they made a wilfull decision that the relative simplicity of electric cars will allow them to avoid a maintenance nightmare down the road by simply replacing whole components (a la Apple).
We'll see how it turns out.
Also, if you're on a 7nm process, odds are there's not a decent way to e.g. drive the transistors for your power window actuator. Samsung's 7nm process has an 3 sigma intrinsic breakdown voltage around 4.8V, which precludes any kind of 5V tolerance and driving 2.5Vt power FETs.
Little 3V3, 5V tolerant microcontrollers are good for a lot of things, and they belong on bigger process. While 10nm might be able to do it, there's not really transistors for it in most libraries.
> 5. For the vast majority of what automakers want, 7nm is overkill. Once there are more high end SoCs running multiple systems including self/assisted-driving, that will come into play. But that is not where the shortage is concentrated.
There was a discussion about this a few months ago. It's not just that newer nodes are overkill, it's that auto components apparently have very long and expensive validation requirements, which would be another explanation for why they are still depending on these older manufacturing processes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28728965