3 ms·
Your post is spot on except, I think, for the point about any other major manufacturer being able to make the switch over to a screen based interface. I think t
by brianpgordon 8y ago
Your post is spot on except, I think, for the point about any other major manufacturer being able to make the switch over to a screen based interface. I think that's far from clear. Building the whole user experience from navigation to climate control to the app on your phone to control everything remotely requires a very different skillset from the firmware type development that car manufacturers are used to. This might be one of those things like when smartphones appeared and makers of feature phones found that the whole game had changed from making great hardware to making great software. Elon Musk talks about a marketplace for apps to run on your car, which is a bit much, but integrations with smart homes and solar systems for power management or first class car-to-car communications could be key differentiators. Software is a totally different game.
- amluto 8y agoSoftware done well is a different game. Tesla’s touchscreen software quality, at least for the Model S, appears to be very, very low. There were some fun posts on HN earlier about a former Tesla employee whose NDA expired talking about the software. A couple of decent embedded Qt developers should be able to cranks out a system of comparable quality in a few months. The major exception is the map app, which would take at least some real effort.