Soaring chip costs, driven by AI data center demand, are forcing more auto OEMs to raise prices. Changan was the latest Chinese vendor to have to increase prices by 2,000 to 10,000 yuan (up to $150), with Chery, Xiaomi, BYD and others also raising prices recently on lidar equipped models. It’s not necessarily the lidar unit itself that is directly affected, rather the additional memory in the compute systems required to process lidar point clouds. Memory was always a significant component in the overall electronics BOM cost of vehicles in the past 10 years and has been growing as advanced digital cockpit and ADAS features have been added. DRAM prices have surged almost 100% in Q1 ’26 and NAND Flash prices were up by more than 50%, with more price increases forecast and little relief in sight.
In this month’s newsletter DVN’s Jurgen Dickmann interviews Mercedes’s Georges Massing about the company’s L3/L4 strategy. He also interviews author, Mario Herger, about the future of autonomous driving. We are continuing to plan speakers for our Stuttgart Sensing and Autonomous Driving Conference in November. If you are interested to speak, exhibit and/or demo a car, please reach out to me.
Martin Booth
DVN USA Representative
[email protected]
