[bluGill]

What does blink mean? Does your chips work when it is -70c - cars are used in arctic environments and so automakers have special tests to ensure they work in cold temperatures most of us will never see. Do you chips work when it is +65c - the inside of a parked car will get that hot, and the car is expected to work. How long will you keep the new chips in production - the longer the better we need to provide spare parts for everything for at least 10 years, so if you go out of production we need to fill a warehouse with the final production run just in case the things start mass failing in a few years.

I think the auto industry is looking to see if they can bypass the whole above mess with their own fabs. They don't need fancy processes, they need something reliable that they can depend on for years. The cost to a fab though means they need to worry about anti-trust as they can't go alone.

[gbear605]

I think OP is saying that TSMC is saying “Okay auto manufacturers, we don’t want to manufacture chips that meet all of your requirements when we have so much order volume, so you’ll have to drop the requirements or find a different fab.” So the auto industry making their own fabs is exactly what TSMC wants them to do.

[MichaelZuo]

And the automakers will likely balk at spending many dozens of billions of capital outside of their core competency.

Since all the other legacy fabs are also at capacity for the next few years.

[iancmceachern]

It's rapidly becoming part of their core competency, no different than steel panel manufacturing.

[gbear605]

If the auto manufacturers don’t want chips to be part of their core competencies, then they’ll probably need to go back to building cars like they did thirty years ago.