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by wlievens 4507 days ago
Cars have ridiculously much electronics in them and you cannot "print" those just like that in a small shop. Have you seen how big wnd expensive a wafer fab is?
3 comments

I have seen what people are developing. Besides, cars do not need to have micro electronics.

http://reprap.org/wiki/MetalicaRap

http://medtechinsider.com/archives/24967

http://www.nthdegreetech.com/printed-semiconductors.php

That said, there will always be some things for which economies of scale win out against customisation, and I suspect that many electronics components are in that bracket. Luckily we have things like FPGAs, so you don't need to keep a huge stock of specialised chips to make a wide variety of devices.

I don't think there is a market for cars without micro electronics. Especially not with the rise of electric cars.

FPGA's are several orders of magnitude more expensive than mass-produced electronics.

Modern cars contain more than just controller electronics. What about image sensors, for instance, for automated parking systems? You can't 3D-print an image sensor. Not without a clean room at least.

What's preventing all of those electronics from becoming dumb terminals and abstracting everything away to the central processing unit?
Distributed intelligence is more robust. And the electronics need to be fast for your airbag and ABS.
Presumably you don't have to "print" all parts there.