I hope the car makers figure out their chip constraints.
My gut says it has nothing to do with capacity, but more about keeping fewer automobiles available for use on the road.
For each individual automaker that might make sense (ignoring legal consequences) but only if they can raise prices enough to make up the lost profit. That is, if you normally would have sold 1 million cars with a $4000 average profit over a given time period, if you are limited to selling 500K cars you need more than an $8000 profit to reach the point where it pays off.
If you look at major automakers' profits they are a little more profitable than they were before the pandemic, but not by much (GM/Ford small 5-15% gain for last 12 months versus 2019, Toyota a bit of a decline) So if this is some big scam so they can make more money, it isn't working out that well.
Collusion only works if the incentives to stick with it are greater than the incentives to cheat. The small gain in profit (let alone Toyota's drop in profit) provides little incentive to stick with it. On the other hand the incentive to cheat and resume full production, thus selling many more cars and making far higher profits while everyone else is still limiting production, is simply too overwhelming for collusion between automakers to be a reasonable hypothesis.
This type of "supply shock" economy is not one the world has seen for a long time. The best parallels are post war economic slowdowns in the US & Europe after WW I and in the US post WW II (but not in Europe because so much infrastructure was destroyed) Employment remained high (as it is today) while supply could not match demand (again like today) because the factories couldn't convert from making tanks and bombs to making cars and refrigerators overnight - and there was a lot of pent up demand for all consumer products in the US after WW II but it took a long time to catch up.
It isn't the same thing today but it is a similar situation. Companies were caught flat footed making things people didn't want (cars in December 1941 and April 2020) and responded ways that limited their ability to go "back to normal" very quickly (converting the factory to one making planes in 1942, canceling orders for parts in May 2020)