As carmakers increasingly prioritise electric vehicles, cars are becoming electronic devices
Bindiya Vakil, Tom Linton, Why we are in the midst of a global semiconductor shortage, Harvard Business Review, Feb, '21.
The modern electric cars are full of semiconductor chips, be it the music console, or the battery charging control or locking system or the auto drive circuit, modern cars are full of integrated circuits. It was very shocking to read the above statement, that modern EVs are no more mechanical engineering devices, they are electronic devices running on solar energy and tyres.
The other day I was listening to a talk by Jeff Bezos at an MIT lecture hall. He was introducing Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce portal, he founded as not an e-commerce company but as a Computer science company.. Selling goods is nothing great, but enabling the data and information to the customers to place orders, to the suppliers to transport the goods, to the transporters and warehouses to decide what to communicate, store and dispatch, etc are all outputs from running queries on databases. If the database fails, the whole system fails. 
Amazon works on the strength of its databases and the output got by the queries to these databases. Similarly ther modern day EVs are just electronic devices working on semi-conductor chips right from navigation control to lasers to security to music console , etc.. what not..
If any of these chips or integrated circuits fail, the whole vehicle comes to a standstill. The global transportation, financial system, farming and agricultural system, the educational system, the crypto currencies, entertainment systems, the telecommunications, data storage etc are all marvels of digital technology and Internet Communication Technology (ICT). Wherever we look around, we find microprocessor based integrated chips on silicon wafers controlling our lives to the core. Very soon we will find robots and AI controlling healthcare too.
If in the past, fertile land (Silicon dioxide based sand) contolled the growth of civilization from cave dwelling to city dwelling with all modern developments, the next growth of humanity is going to be bnased on Silicon based semiconductors housing millions and millions of integrated circuits.
It is said that annually, the world FAB facilities produce around a trillion Integrated Circuit (IC) chips, ie. about 138 chips per capita and we are edged to moving ahead with more and chips controlling what we see, read, feel, communicate and learn and how we move.
Technology is definitely turning the world upside down. Are we moving in the right direction, are we going to a centralised control of human civilization on earth ?
George..
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