I'm not even sure it's strictly speaking still true that automotive only uses outdated fabs. Tesla seems to have disrupted the use of low-end chips at least in high end cars, like Jaguar Land Rover.
Change "probably" to "definitely" and I'm with you. Automotive chips need to be a lot more reliable than a PS5 GPU, and that kind of reliability takes time to test and prove. Not to mention that automakers try not to change parts unnecessarily because their economies of scale are only as useful as their ability to use one component across several models and years. If you care little about thermal efficiency and power consumption, and you're not doing extremely abstract computations, there's no reason whatsoever to spend tons of money on a smaller lithography. I was looking into this recently, and the price difference between some of the equipment involved is around two orders of magnitude from the leading edge to the trailing edge.
And an Air Freight shortage even if you do pay 10x to jump the production queue https://www.wsj.com/articles/snarled-supply-chain-trips-up-s...
I'm not even sure it's strictly speaking still true that automotive only uses outdated fabs. Tesla seems to have disrupted the use of low-end chips at least in high end cars, like Jaguar Land Rover.