NIO, a leading smart electric vehicle company, recently announced that due to a shortage of chips, the company has decided to suspend production at the Hefei Jianghuai Automobile Factory for 5 days starting from March 29.  
Some car chips that originally cost more than 70 yuan have increased to more than 2,000 yuan, but even if you are willing to pay high prices and queue up, you may not be able to buy them.
 
What makes the domestic automobile industry panic due to the "core shortage" is not only the intensifying shortage of automobile chips in the global supply chain, but also the potential safety concerns caused by the abnormally high proportion of my country's automobile chip imports.
 
With the shortage of imported chips leading to limited production capacity of car companies, everyone from car companies to module suppliers and semiconductor manufacturers have admitted that it will still be difficult to replace them with domestic automotive chips in the short term. How to build a domestic cycle for my country's automotive industry chain needs to be solved urgently.

Is it hard to find imported cores? Domestic cores are lingering outside the door    
Since the end of last year, the impact of the "core shortage" among car companies has continued to spread. Many domestic and foreign car companies such as General Motors and NIO have announced that they will temporarily reduce production due to chip shortages. Industry insiders pointed out that more than 90% of the chips used by Chinese car companies need to be imported.  
In Anhui, an executive of a car company told reporters that taking the car chips purchased by the car company as an example, 90% of them are imported brands.  
"You can see the price increase of automotive chips by 20 to 30 times, and even more than 200 times." The person in charge of the supply chain of a car company predicted, "It is difficult to judge whether the 'chip shortage' will continue until the end of this year or next year."
On one side are imported chips that you can’t even buy in the queue, and on the other side are domestic chips lingering at the door of the car factory.  
A person in charge of a self-owned brand car company said frankly, "There are few domestic substitute manufacturers, and some substitute tests of domestic chips are being carried out, but the results are unstable."
Hefei Jiefa Technology Co., Ltd. is a well-known independent brand IC design company. Hu Xiaoli, the company's deputy general manager, said that the functional safety of car-grade chips must be certified by a third-party authoritative organization. Even if it passes third-party certification, there is still a long way to go before entering the supply chain.
 
   What is the difficulty in localized substitution?    
"The shortage of automobile chips has exposed a major shortcoming in my country's automobile manufacturing, which needs to be solved urgently to avoid becoming an 'obstruction' to the development of our automobile industry in the future." said Niu Nutao, director of the Anhui Provincial Department of Economics and Information Technology.  
In the current international industrial environment, there is a long way to go to make up for shortcomings.  
First, the semiconductor industry chain is relatively global. The more technically difficult and complex a chip is, the more it relies on import channels.  
Compared with consumer electronics chips, automotive chips account for a small proportion of the semiconductor industry, with high requirements but low profits. Even if semiconductor manufacturers are willing to expand production for automotive chip orders, they still have to face problems such as large investment and long cycle.  
Second, the demand for automotive chips is soaring, and the technical threshold is "rising." With the popularization of new energy vehicles, the automotive industry's demand for chips will become larger and larger, chip functions will become more complex, and the technical difficulty will become higher and higher.  
Against this background, the "mountain" that stands between domestic automotive chips and the market is not easy to climb. If domestic automotive chips do not form economies of scale, it will be difficult for them to be competitive in the market.  
   Seize the shortage window period to accelerate the research and development and application of domestic cores    
The industry recommends taking advantage of the automotive chip shortage window to build an industry collaborative docking platform between chip companies and OEMs, trial the "first set" policy in the chip field, and use "policy insurance" to accelerate the industrialization of independent chips.  
Establish a collaborative docking platform for the automotive chip industry, formulate a development outline for domestic automotive chip technology routes, clarify the development goals for the localization rate of automotive chips, and increase the construction of the chip industry chain, key support, and intellectual property protection. Strengthen industrial ecological integration. Provide policy encouragement and financial support in the industrial chain ecology, and promote the integrated development of chip ecology, component ecology, and vehicle ecology.  
Explore and trial the “first set” policy for domestically produced automotive chips, increase support for automotive-grade chips, and enable complete vehicle and parts companies to be “willing to use, dare to use, and proactively use” and reduce application risks for complete vehicles, systems, and automotive chip companies.  
 

Accelerate the improvement of the testing standards and certification system for domestic automotive-grade chips to avoid the problem that domestic manufacturers launch automotive-grade chips but OEMs are afraid to use them, and promote the integration of these standards with international standards.

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