Chip Shortage Could Slow Electric Vehicle Rollouts
From www.scientificamerican.com
2021-08-25 18:00:00
Corbin Hiar, E&E News
Excerpt:
An automotive chip shortage has led to production cuts around the globe, just as many carmakers are gearing up to expand their fleets of electric vehicles.
The shortage is a result of pandemic-related constraints on supply chains and other factors. And it could prolong the world’s sluggish transition to electric vehicles if chips remain scarce in the coming months, experts say.
“If we’ve got an ongoing chip shortage for an extended period of time, that means those [electric] vehicles can’t get built, and they can’t get sold, and we continue to have more older vehicles staying on the road longer,” said Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at the market research firm Guidehouse Insights. “So that’s definitely a problem.”
That would delay the decarbonization of the emissions-intensive transportation sector, an effort most scientists believe is necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
The transportation sector accounted for 29 percent of the roughly 6.6 billion metric tons of…
