Law Enforcement Starting To Feel The Chip Shortage Pain As Ford Is Canceling Police Orders

You are right. Here is one Studebaker ready to go right now:

 

Jeez.

1st, in case you didn't notice, there was no actual journalism involved in the creation of this article. Everything is sourced from elsewhere.

2nd, as far as what we've seen at the ramp, there is no specific shortage that only effects Interceptors. If anything, we've actually seen an increase in Interceptor percentage because Ford prioritized fleet vehicle production for most of the last year.
There have been order cancelations across all the vehicle lines, so it's no surprise a few small police orders were among them. Especially towards the end of model year production. Those small orders are much more likely to be canceled than a bigger order anyways. Just this last month we hauled 60+ Interceptors to an upfitter for the BNSF Police, which was actually more units than they were told to expect.



Tl;dr: Junk internet "news" source doesn't have a clue what they're talking about.

 

Comparing a police car to a personal vehicle is like comparing an apple to a French fry. The crown vics I used to run had over 10k hours on them and around 120k miles. Those cars ran nonstop shift after shift, day after day. Winter time they never shut down, and I do mean never. As tough as they were they just start falling apart after awhile.

 

I’d think that a well maintained vehicle from a southern state that was assigned to one person as a take home car , even if it had high miles and a zillion hours on it would be better than a vehicle that was so rusty it wasn’t safe to drive .

but I’m not an overpaid government bureaucrat that sits in an office spending money taken from hardworking taxpayers either , so what do I know ?

 

They wont be fabbing any time soon, foundries have a long spinup time, even once the facility is built, expect 3 more years before a single peice of productive silicon comes out. (The article on intel says "Actual chip production isn’t expected until 2025" but thats not realistic)

 

Not only that, but the TMSC fab going up in Arizona and the Intel fab going up in Ohio simply wont's be able to make the chips needed in automotive applications.
Basically the whole process is about wafer size. Most current gen chips come in 22 to 65 nm (nanometers) wafer sizes. The automotive industry uses 95nm wafer size. Mostly because they actually care about reliability. After all the components need to last 20+ years in conditions no computer will survive in. Physical dirty environments, -50 degrees to 120 degrees, etc. Then there is the dirty power. Nominally 12v, but heeds to work anywhere from 11.5 to 14.1 volts, and do this 20 years from now.

The new factories simply will not be able to do the 95nm the auto companies (well, except Tesla and Rivian and the like) use. But that doesn't mean it won't impact current production and the plants that can do 95nm wafers will co back to focusing on those chips. But it will take time.

 

Just give them these and tell'em to go pound the pavement

 

Agree to disagree