During Tesla’s Q1 2021 earnings call last week, CEO Elon Musk...

During Tesla’s Q1 2021 earnings call last week, CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla had some very important supply chain issue, mentioning the chip shortage, and even compared Tesla’s logistics difficulties to World War 2 logistics challenges:

“This quarter, and I think we’ll continue to see that a little bit in Q2 and Q3, had some of the most difficult supply chain challenges that we’ve ever experienced in the life of Tesla and same difficulties with supply chain, with parts — over the whole range of parts. Obviously, people have heard about the chip shortage.”

Tesla uses several chips inside its vehicles for different control systems and its infotainment system. Most famously, the automaker uses a chip that it designed itself for its self-driving software.

That chip is produced by Samsung.

Interestingly, Tesla disclosed that it managed to avoid being too affected by the chip shortage through pivoting to microcontrollers and developing new firmware to work with new chips from different suppliers.

The company wrote in its shareholders letter:

“In Q1, we were able to navigate through global chip supply shortage issues in part by pivoting extremely quickly to new microcontrollers, while simultaneously developing firmware for new chips made by new suppliers.”

The automaker did note that the supply chain issues could still affect them through the next few quarters, but Tesla only had to close its Fremont factory for a few days last quarter, which is not as bad as the production halts that some other automakers are reporting.


new chips from different suppliers.