7 ms·

The software folks (Google, Apple) are going to figure out how to build great cars much faster than the car folks are going to learn how to build great software

by Rezo 11y ago

The software folks (Google, Apple) are going to figure out how to build great cars much faster than the car folks are going to learn how to build great software. Car companies are incentivized through their engineering know-how, massive supply chains and complex dealership relations to keep optimizing complex gas engines that require significant maintenance. The software folks, having no burden of legacy on the other hand are incentivized to make the engine and car platform as simple as possible, basically an electric motor (or 2, or 4...) with virtually no serviceable parts. The cost and profit structures of the two sides will look very different, and that is going to make the customer experience much better on the "innovative" side (no more haggling the price of a car for example, 1st party servicing, etc). Forget the Palm quote. Look at Nokia in 2007, when the iPhone was introduced: 50%+ marketshare, 100,000+ employees, 100 million+ devices/year, they already had "advanced" features like app stores and web browsers. But they were fundamentally a hardware company and supply chain oriented, optimizing the bill of materials and crippling their products to death, and could not make the transition. Not even 10 years later, they are extinct! That is what BMW and friends should be worried about.

venomsnake 11y ago
Just image how fun would have been the Apple Maps rollout if it was deployed on cars. With the software glitches that has plagued smartphones in the last decade - we would have had a small genocide on our hands if it was translated on fast chunks of metal, able to kill couple of people on collision. A single messed OTA (or heaven forbid maliciously corrupted) could inflict some serious pain.
- Retra 11y ago
  If Apple Maps was mission-critical industrial-strength navigation software (as you'd have to assume in this hypothetical) then maybe Apple would have put more money and effort into making it work well. Why would you assume the software they wrote for a smart-phone would be the same software they'd write for a car?
  - venomsnake 11y ago
    Because sloppiness and bad habits tend to propagate.
  - mindslight 11y ago
    With navigation being one of the key features of smartphones, it seems like Apple Maps would certainly be mission critical to Apple. Furthermore, it seems like we've already forgotten that telephones are supposed to be reliable. Take the Android Hangouts App for instance. In using it for a year, I've yet to have a non-buggy experience. First, the phone would stop ringing for incoming calls. Recently half of my outgoing calls will fail to open the audio device, so the other end can hear me but I can't hear them. Nevermind the everpresent dropped calls where the app just disappears. If your response is to say "yeah, but that's a downmarket VOIP app" then you've proven my point, given that it is published by one of the largest web companies around. Bell engineers made reliability a design goal. Internet engineering assumed poor reliability could be compensated by endpoint software - this works really well for layer 3, but by the time you get to layer 6 and 7 you should really stop kicking that can down the road! Your landline keeps working in a power outage because every CO is full of lead acid batteries, all the equipment runs off of a 48VDC rail, and power is even supplied to end-user devices so they continue to work as well. From the SV viewpoint this is obviously a complete and utter waste, but it's awfully nice to be able to communicate in a power outage (especially as emergencies tend to compound). Nevermind the modern standard of ridiculous UI latency. The general guideline for an imperceptible delay is 10ms - that's 10 million instructions at 1GHz. Yet anything that gets "modernized" with a touchscreen inevitably has input lag 10 to 100 times that - amateur hour! Yet these horrid devices are invading everywhere you'd traditionally have a simple well thought out interface with tactile feedback - including cars. Why bother spending design time up front when you can punt to soft controls, and then release "updates" if you're ever taken to task? So no, I have little faith that our self driving car future won't involve a lot of abrupt stopping (because presumably the motor controllers will be engineered [correctly]) due to some undiagnosable error, and then a 2 minute wait while the system reboots. I can only hope the windows aren't LCD panels that turn dark for the process.
    - venomsnake 11y ago
- Rezo 11y ago
  Cars are still regulated and will have to pass safety and compliance tests. I think the companies themselves also realize that they're going to have be extremely careful with updates, not the least from a liability point of view. But, where there's a will, there'a way, and mainstream OTA car updates are entirely inevitable in my opinion. But the traditional car manufacturers do no have this will. It does not fit their world view. The idea of an OTA that changes the car is abhorrent to them. They looked at bemusement when Tesla did UI feature updates OTA, confusion/doubt when Tesla changed driving dynamics OTA last year, and horrification at the "self driving" features recently deployed. And they have no plans in this regard either, they are entirely convinced they are right and the rest of the world is going mad and will surely self-correct. The luxury 2015 model German sedan you buy today will NEVER receive a new feature, or even bugfixes except at a dealer, while Google and Apple are all about creating new platforms spanning multiple products & years. And that is why the Germans will lose.
  - blub 11y ago
    OTA updates touching critical components are insane in the security environment of 2015. Were you paying attention to what kind of attackers and exploits have been flying around in the past few years?
- bluthru 11y ago
  Tesla doesn't have the software resources of Apple and they're making it work.
  - venomsnake 11y ago
    It is not about resources, but culture. Apple have a culture that delivers extremely high quality hardware, but they don't have the culture to deliver good software.
jarek 11y ago
> incentivized to make the engine and car platform as simple as possible The question at core of the post is: how simple is possible? When iPhone launched it didn't have copy and paste. That was fine because you can iterate on software and user expectations are different. But you can't launch a car without airbags. What complexity can the software folks eliminate and still have a viable product? The internal combustion drivetrain is a good example, though replacing it with electric has its own complexities (e.g. batteries and their control systems). But is there much more? Software-culture companies are having problems being clever with just door handles. Will you convince users they don't need reliable cup holders - a plain old boring mechanical part? If you can't simplify much more, will just IC to electric swap make enough of a difference?
- timcederman 11y ago
  Terrible example. When the iPhone launched, it could make calls and send messages extremely reliably. It was foremost a phone. Copy/paste wasn't a core part of that functionality.
  - jarek 11y ago
    > Terrible example. When the iPhone launched, it could make calls and send messages extremely reliably. Unless you were holding it wrong ;) > Copy/paste wasn't a core part of that functionality. So, what complex car functionality do you reckon is non-core and can be cut by Apple?
  - sorenjan 11y ago
    According to test engineers at Ericsson, the first iPhone was "a crappy phone" [0]. It routinely dropped calls [1, 2]. It also didn't have 3G or MMS, something most if not all other phones had at the time. But apparently it was good enough, did other things well, and could be updated and replaced. That's a major difference between consumer electronics and cars. [0] http://www.techsite.io/2015/10/16/ericsson-engineers-thought-iphone-was-a-crappy-phone/ http://www.techsite.io/2015/10/16/ericsson-engineers-thought... [1] http://www.pencomputing.com/reviews/apple_iphone_3months.html http://www.pencomputing.com/reviews/apple_iphone_3months.htm... [2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/31/AR2009073100971.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07...
sgustard 11y ago
In addition to the large legacy company alternatives (big tech companies, big car companies) there's lots of room for startups like Renovo Motors to innovate here. I agree the slower moving of those big companies has the most to worry about on multiple fronts.
gozo 11y ago
Uhm, no? Nokia was (relatively speaking) a software company. The South Korean and Chinese manufacturers, which are closer to production, excelled while the software companies like Nokia, RIM and Palm didn't. The iPhone was ahead of the market and despite the turbulence Nokia had caught up as of the N9. By then it didn't matter though. Because between Android being free and the importance of apps there were no longer much of a place for them in the market.
Hermel 11y ago
There are much more open questions than that. Will Google figure out how to reliably support a product for 20 years after it has been sold? Will Tesla figure out the logistics of manufacturing and marketing more than three models? (The VW group introduces 100 per year.) Will Apple figure out how to cost-effectively change winter and summer tires for all its customers twice a year? Can Microsoft become a sexy luxury brand like BMW?
- Rezo 11y ago
  The proliferation of models is a huge burden, not a boon, and one of the big reasons that the then dominant phone manufacturers were not able to turn the ship around in time when the market changed. It turns out, when you have 100 models, it's really hard to engage in "platform thinking". When the iPhone came out, it provided a single unified platform to target for the first time; despite all the effort other players had poured into their developer offerings they were organizationally not setup to succeed in providing a single target. As a customer, do I even really want to have to research and pick between the BMW 328d Xdrive and 335i Xdrive Gran Turismo? If I use the configurator on BMW.com, can I even get the exact car I spec? No, of course not, at the end of playing with the tool I get a phone number for some shady dealer who's going to sell me what he has in stock unless I want to wait 3 months. If Apple releases the "iCar 2018" as a single model (customizable online, just check the box for 4WD), it will have all sorts of implications for the third party services and parts market. Just look at the whole ecosystem that has sprung up around Apple already. It's so much easier to buy fancy third party tires or whatever when you know it will be compatible with your car. Question your assumptions. Why does Tesla need more than 3 models? Why does the tires need changing twice a year? Could a value prop be made where these concerns are just eliminated, which would be a competitive advantage for Apple and good for customers, while for traditional manufacturers and their dealers "fixing" this would cause a negative impact. Again, look at the incentives at play.
abalone 11y ago
This is missing the point that Gassée raises about software culture. It's not just a question of the software folks figuring out how to build car hardware. It's, can the software folks figure out how to make bug free software? Most Silicon Valley "cultures" are geared towards constant rapid innovation at the expense of more bugs. Apple for instance tends to favor adding groundbreaking new features as quickly as possible, followed by a big stability-oriented cleanup release once every few years or so (e.g. Snow Leopard, El Capitan). This results in complaints about software quality, but people deal with the bugs since the features are so desirable. It's a different proposition when bugs = people get hurt. Not a ton of SV companies have operated in those critical environments and those that do (medical) tend to be really "boring" and enterprise-y. This is going to be AS MUCH OR MORE of a shift as learning how to engineer a different kind of hardware.
- alkonaut 11y ago
  I don't think you can draw any conclusions from buggy OSX software that Apple couldn't write a good robust realtime system for a car. Or that they couldn't build a car. The people who would build car brains for Apple would be hired from Car manufacturers. The analogy would be any non-car software made by car manufacturers. It usually stinks, but isn't made by the same people who build car sw. It stinks because it can, which is because it's cheaper and no one dies because the www build-your-car configurator has bugs. As for actually manufacturing a car: If I was Apple I'd buy a facility like the recently closed Saab plant in Sweden, where there are lots of skilled people and a factory ready to use (It's actually still making cars at small scale for various small manufacturers)
  - abalone 11y ago
    Didn't say they couldn't. But Gassée's point is you can't just hire people; there has to be an internal cultural shift as well about how to make software. That is arguably a harder change than just learning about a new type of hardware. It means every release is a stability release (times ten).
  - kamaal 11y ago
    >>The people who would build car brains for Apple would be hired from Car manufacturers. From the perspective of the car makers they too can hire software brains from software companies. Do you seriously think, a motor, chassis and four wheels are all there is to make a car? Or its easy to manufacture cars in bulk. By any reasonable argument, learning how to write software(skills for which are common place today) is far easy than learning to build and manufacture millions of cars.
kamaal 11y ago
>>basically an electric motor (or 2, or 4...) with virtually no serviceable parts. With bulk of the people out there having no infrastructure to charge their electric cars. And needless to say if we know we are generating enough electricity to have countries full of electric cars.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

by Rezo 11y ago

venomsnake 11y ago

Just image how fun would have been the Apple Maps rollout if it was deployed on cars. With the software glitches that has plagued smartphones in the last decade - we would have had a small genocide on our hands if it was translated on fast chunks of metal, able to kill couple of people on collision. A single messed OTA (or heaven forbid maliciously corrupted) could inflict some serious pain.

Retra 11y ago
If Apple Maps was mission-critical industrial-strength navigation software (as you'd have to assume in this hypothetical) then maybe Apple would have put more money and effort into making it work well. Why would you assume the software they wrote for a smart-phone would be the same software they'd write for a car?
- venomsnake 11y ago
  Because sloppiness and bad habits tend to propagate.
- mindslight 11y ago
  With navigation being one of the key features of smartphones, it seems like Apple Maps would certainly be mission critical to Apple. Furthermore, it seems like we've already forgotten that telephones are supposed to be reliable. Take the Android Hangouts App for instance. In using it for a year, I've yet to have a non-buggy experience. First, the phone would stop ringing for incoming calls. Recently half of my outgoing calls will fail to open the audio device, so the other end can hear me but I can't hear them. Nevermind the everpresent dropped calls where the app just disappears. If your response is to say "yeah, but that's a downmarket VOIP app" then you've proven my point, given that it is published by one of the largest web companies around. Bell engineers made reliability a design goal. Internet engineering assumed poor reliability could be compensated by endpoint software - this works really well for layer 3, but by the time you get to layer 6 and 7 you should really stop kicking that can down the road! Your landline keeps working in a power outage because every CO is full of lead acid batteries, all the equipment runs off of a 48VDC rail, and power is even supplied to end-user devices so they continue to work as well. From the SV viewpoint this is obviously a complete and utter waste, but it's awfully nice to be able to communicate in a power outage (especially as emergencies tend to compound). Nevermind the modern standard of ridiculous UI latency. The general guideline for an imperceptible delay is 10ms - that's 10 million instructions at 1GHz. Yet anything that gets "modernized" with a touchscreen inevitably has input lag 10 to 100 times that - amateur hour! Yet these horrid devices are invading everywhere you'd traditionally have a simple well thought out interface with tactile feedback - including cars. Why bother spending design time up front when you can punt to soft controls, and then release "updates" if you're ever taken to task? So no, I have little faith that our self driving car future won't involve a lot of abrupt stopping (because presumably the motor controllers will be engineered [correctly]) due to some undiagnosable error, and then a 2 minute wait while the system reboots. I can only hope the windows aren't LCD panels that turn dark for the process.
  - venomsnake 11y ago
Rezo 11y ago
Cars are still regulated and will have to pass safety and compliance tests. I think the companies themselves also realize that they're going to have be extremely careful with updates, not the least from a liability point of view. But, where there's a will, there'a way, and mainstream OTA car updates are entirely inevitable in my opinion. But the traditional car manufacturers do no have this will. It does not fit their world view. The idea of an OTA that changes the car is abhorrent to them. They looked at bemusement when Tesla did UI feature updates OTA, confusion/doubt when Tesla changed driving dynamics OTA last year, and horrification at the "self driving" features recently deployed. And they have no plans in this regard either, they are entirely convinced they are right and the rest of the world is going mad and will surely self-correct. The luxury 2015 model German sedan you buy today will NEVER receive a new feature, or even bugfixes except at a dealer, while Google and Apple are all about creating new platforms spanning multiple products & years. And that is why the Germans will lose.
- blub 11y ago
  OTA updates touching critical components are insane in the security environment of 2015. Were you paying attention to what kind of attackers and exploits have been flying around in the past few years?
bluthru 11y ago
Tesla doesn't have the software resources of Apple and they're making it work.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  It is not about resources, but culture. Apple have a culture that delivers extremely high quality hardware, but they don't have the culture to deliver good software.

jarek 11y ago

> incentivized to make the engine and car platform as simple as possible The question at core of the post is: how simple is possible? When iPhone launched it didn't have copy and paste. That was fine because you can iterate on software and user expectations are different. But you can't launch a car without airbags. What complexity can the software folks eliminate and still have a viable product? The internal combustion drivetrain is a good example, though replacing it with electric has its own complexities (e.g. batteries and their control systems). But is there much more? Software-culture companies are having problems being clever with just door handles. Will you convince users they don't need reliable cup holders - a plain old boring mechanical part? If you can't simplify much more, will just IC to electric swap make enough of a difference?

timcederman 11y ago
Terrible example. When the iPhone launched, it could make calls and send messages extremely reliably. It was foremost a phone. Copy/paste wasn't a core part of that functionality.
- jarek 11y ago
  > Terrible example. When the iPhone launched, it could make calls and send messages extremely reliably. Unless you were holding it wrong ;) > Copy/paste wasn't a core part of that functionality. So, what complex car functionality do you reckon is non-core and can be cut by Apple?
- sorenjan 11y ago
  According to test engineers at Ericsson, the first iPhone was "a crappy phone" [0]. It routinely dropped calls [1, 2]. It also didn't have 3G or MMS, something most if not all other phones had at the time. But apparently it was good enough, did other things well, and could be updated and replaced. That's a major difference between consumer electronics and cars. [0] http://www.techsite.io/2015/10/16/ericsson-engineers-thought-iphone-was-a-crappy-phone/ http://www.techsite.io/2015/10/16/ericsson-engineers-thought... [1] http://www.pencomputing.com/reviews/apple_iphone_3months.html http://www.pencomputing.com/reviews/apple_iphone_3months.htm... [2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/31/AR2009073100971.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07...

sgustard 11y ago

In addition to the large legacy company alternatives (big tech companies, big car companies) there's lots of room for startups like Renovo Motors to innovate here. I agree the slower moving of those big companies has the most to worry about on multiple fronts.

gozo 11y ago

Uhm, no? Nokia was (relatively speaking) a software company. The South Korean and Chinese manufacturers, which are closer to production, excelled while the software companies like Nokia, RIM and Palm didn't. The iPhone was ahead of the market and despite the turbulence Nokia had caught up as of the N9. By then it didn't matter though. Because between Android being free and the importance of apps there were no longer much of a place for them in the market.

Hermel 11y ago

There are much more open questions than that. Will Google figure out how to reliably support a product for 20 years after it has been sold? Will Tesla figure out the logistics of manufacturing and marketing more than three models? (The VW group introduces 100 per year.) Will Apple figure out how to cost-effectively change winter and summer tires for all its customers twice a year? Can Microsoft become a sexy luxury brand like BMW?

Rezo 11y ago
The proliferation of models is a huge burden, not a boon, and one of the big reasons that the then dominant phone manufacturers were not able to turn the ship around in time when the market changed. It turns out, when you have 100 models, it's really hard to engage in "platform thinking". When the iPhone came out, it provided a single unified platform to target for the first time; despite all the effort other players had poured into their developer offerings they were organizationally not setup to succeed in providing a single target. As a customer, do I even really want to have to research and pick between the BMW 328d Xdrive and 335i Xdrive Gran Turismo? If I use the configurator on BMW.com, can I even get the exact car I spec? No, of course not, at the end of playing with the tool I get a phone number for some shady dealer who's going to sell me what he has in stock unless I want to wait 3 months. If Apple releases the "iCar 2018" as a single model (customizable online, just check the box for 4WD), it will have all sorts of implications for the third party services and parts market. Just look at the whole ecosystem that has sprung up around Apple already. It's so much easier to buy fancy third party tires or whatever when you know it will be compatible with your car. Question your assumptions. Why does Tesla need more than 3 models? Why does the tires need changing twice a year? Could a value prop be made where these concerns are just eliminated, which would be a competitive advantage for Apple and good for customers, while for traditional manufacturers and their dealers "fixing" this would cause a negative impact. Again, look at the incentives at play.

abalone 11y ago

This is missing the point that Gassée raises about software culture. It's not just a question of the software folks figuring out how to build car hardware. It's, can the software folks figure out how to make bug free software? Most Silicon Valley "cultures" are geared towards constant rapid innovation at the expense of more bugs. Apple for instance tends to favor adding groundbreaking new features as quickly as possible, followed by a big stability-oriented cleanup release once every few years or so (e.g. Snow Leopard, El Capitan). This results in complaints about software quality, but people deal with the bugs since the features are so desirable. It's a different proposition when bugs = people get hurt. Not a ton of SV companies have operated in those critical environments and those that do (medical) tend to be really "boring" and enterprise-y. This is going to be AS MUCH OR MORE of a shift as learning how to engineer a different kind of hardware.

alkonaut 11y ago
I don't think you can draw any conclusions from buggy OSX software that Apple couldn't write a good robust realtime system for a car. Or that they couldn't build a car. The people who would build car brains for Apple would be hired from Car manufacturers. The analogy would be any non-car software made by car manufacturers. It usually stinks, but isn't made by the same people who build car sw. It stinks because it can, which is because it's cheaper and no one dies because the www build-your-car configurator has bugs. As for actually manufacturing a car: If I was Apple I'd buy a facility like the recently closed Saab plant in Sweden, where there are lots of skilled people and a factory ready to use (It's actually still making cars at small scale for various small manufacturers)
- abalone 11y ago
  Didn't say they couldn't. But Gassée's point is you can't just hire people; there has to be an internal cultural shift as well about how to make software. That is arguably a harder change than just learning about a new type of hardware. It means every release is a stability release (times ten).
- kamaal 11y ago
  >>The people who would build car brains for Apple would be hired from Car manufacturers. From the perspective of the car makers they too can hire software brains from software companies. Do you seriously think, a motor, chassis and four wheels are all there is to make a car? Or its easy to manufacture cars in bulk. By any reasonable argument, learning how to write software(skills for which are common place today) is far easy than learning to build and manufacture millions of cars.

kamaal 11y ago

>>basically an electric motor (or 2, or 4...) with virtually no serviceable parts. With bulk of the people out there having no infrastructure to charge their electric cars. And needless to say if we know we are generating enough electricity to have countries full of electric cars.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]