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#The Wall Street Journal: How Tesla’s software focus helped EV maker navigate the chip shortage

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“#The Wall Street Journal: How Tesla’s software focus helped EV maker navigate the chip shortage”

Electric-vehicle maker is expected to manufacture roughly 80% more vehicles this year than it did in 2020

Tesla Inc. has emerged as one of the auto industry’s biggest winners in a year plagued by semiconductor shortages and snarled global supply chains. It owes that success in some measure to its Silicon Valley roots.

Elon Musk’s electric-vehicle maker
TSLA,
-0.21%
is poised to manufacture roughly 80% more vehicles this year than it did in 2020, analyst forecasts indicate, on pace for its fastest annual production growth since 2018. The global auto industry, hit hard by supply-chain disruptions, is expected to produce around 1% more vehicles than last year and 15% fewer than in 2019, according to IHS Markit.

Tesla has been able to keep production lines running in part by leaning on in-house software engineering expertise that has made it more adept than many rival auto makers at adjusting to a global shortfall of semiconductors, industry executives and consultants said. Chips are used in everything from controlling an electric motor to charging a phone.

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Semiconductor executives and consultants said Tesla, as a still relatively young car company, had the advantage of designing its vehicles from the ground-up, rather than adding parts in a piecemeal fashion over decades as many legacy auto makers have done. That allowed Tesla to consolidate systems, some of them said.

An expanded version of this report appears at WSJ.com.

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