A New Shortage Could Raise Electric Vehicle Prices Even Further

It seems the recent RAM and chip shortages will affect more than just the consumer electronics industry, raising prices even in automotive, particularly electric and hybrid vehicles. Many are already anticipating laptops and new devices to change for the worse, compensating for rising costs and availability by including less total RAM. Worse yet, storage may even become a problem for upcoming device launches. But how exactly do these problems affect electric vehicle prices? It's not like an EV needs a GPU or traditional DRAM.

While that's generally correct, electric vehicles still require semiconductors, proprietary computing tech, and RAM, albeit configured for use with specialized systems. Newer EVs contain up to 3,000 semiconductors, while ICE vehicles contain 300 to 1000. It means that shortages create a ripple effect, especially when they involve materials shortages — like material used to create DRAM, semiconductors, and similar logic chips. The shortage is affecting DRAM, NAND Flash, HBM Memory, and other assembled components. The demand is high, supply cannot increase enough to match, and it's creating problems in many industries, ultimately causing prices to rise.

PC prices alone could skyrocket as much as 20% due to RAM shortages. New smartphones, tablets, laptops, game consoles, general gadgets and tech, vehicles, including ICE vehicles, EVs, hybrids, all these products may see prices rise as a result of shortages.

There's no short-term solution. In fact, the outlook is pretty grim according to experts, who say this shortage may be one of the worst ever encountered, possibly even worse than the Nexperia chip crisis. Those same experts are estimating that automakers may have to pivot with their future vehicle designs, adjusting cockpit and autonomy systems, or altering advanced driver assistance (ADAS) tech. Using older DDR4 RAM modules may not even be possible if the chipmakers swap to current-gen only.

A solution in the vehicle market would be to downgrade future models, relying less on modern autonomous and advanced tech solutions. That could make use of fewer chips overall, including fewer semiconductors, but there's no telling how people would react to "dumber" vehicles.

Any way you look at it, price hikes are coming. Some popular cheap Android phone brands have already confirmed it, many PCs have already seen price hikes including affordable Framework models, and vehicle and EV prices are likely going to spike soon if not already. Everyone may have to wait a few years for things to normalize, unfortunately. If you're wondering what's causing all this, it's largely the rapid expansion of AI and its widespread use. Chip manufacturers have shifted production to focus on high-bandwidth memory used by AI data centers versus consumer electronics.