Not relevant to production of consumer vehicles under a temporary shortage of high-tech parts (though, under a longer-term shortage, it might be) but the Soviets had an interesting approach to high-tech dependencies in their military equipment:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_variants_of_Soviet_military_equipment" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_variants_of_Soviet_mili...</a><p>I first encountered the idea of "Monkey Models" in Suvorov's book (referenced on that page).<p>The TL;DR is that the Soviets would design their equipment with the best high-tech sensors, weapons, countermeasures, et c., that they could reasonably manage, <i>but also</i> design the equipment to function with much simpler parts & manufacturing processes. So a high-tech Soviet tank might have an electronic targeting system, but also be designed to work with a simpler glass-and-steel rangefinder that could be built with relatively simple tools, in a half-decent machine shop shed. They might fit their best models with advanced armor plating, but design a variant that replaced all that with a little extra steel. They'd do this with practically everything, including aircraft.<p>Why? Multiple reasons: 1) it let them export "new" equipment to allies and puppet-states at a lower cost and in much greater quantities, by selling them "monkey models" with much of the high-tech gear & parts swapped for low-tech counterparts (older generations of top-end gear would be sent to the closest allies/puppets or, more often, to domestic reserve units, in a kind of tiered system), 2) since most of the Soviet gear the West encountered was in direct or proxy wars with Soviet ally, client, or puppet states, the West couldn't gain much insight into the actual capabilities of modern Soviet equipment, 3) so-equipped allies would be starved of gear that could threaten the actual Soviet military, in case they became adversaries, 4) less-advanced allies could more easily maintain gear without so much high-tech junk in it, and 5) perhaps most importantly, it gave the Soviets a kind of supply-line defense-in-depth—they had not only designed these weapon systems so they could be built (as weaker versions) without high-tech manufacturing, but <i>practiced doing it</i>. In the event of a shooting war with, say, the US, the Soviets could keep shipping (inferior, but much better than nothing) tanks & aircraft to the front lines even if all their high-tech facilities were bombed out of existence and they lost access to advanced materials (say, high-tech armor material), with hardly a hiccup.