> Under pressure to hit fourth-quarter sales goals while coping with widespread semiconductor shortages, Tesla decided to remove one of the two electronic contr

> Under pressure to hit fourth-quarter sales goals while coping with widespread semiconductor shortages, Tesla decided to remove one of the two electronic control units that are normally included in the steering racks of some made-in-China Model 3 and Model Y cars, according to two employees and internal correspondence seen by CNBC. A complete non-story, as long as it still passes safety checks. The automotive industry is always looking to save a few cents here and there - the only requirement is that it does not compromise safety. > "So the cars in the fleet essentially becoming self-driving via software update, I think, might end up being the biggest increase in asset value of any asset class in history. We shall see." Elon Musk, the billion dollar man with a billion promises. I'll make a few bets on this: 1. It won't happen this year. He has been incorrectly guessing it at when it will be ready for many years now. 2. If it does happen this year, it will be blocked legally until proper regulation is ready. If a self-driving car crashes, who is responsible? This needs to be answered, because if it turns out to be Tesla, things will get expensive real quick. 3. If it's not blocked legally, it will be disabled for everybody except those on a subscription service: > Drivers can also buy a more advanced version, called Full Self-Driving, or FSD, for $12,000 or $199 a month (in the U.S.). It won't end up being quite the value-add it's claimed to be. Whatever happened to the Tesla car that would pay for itself? So far it seems to just require even more money, for features already suggested to be free when the idea of the car was first sold. > "If something like a chip or an ECU is not providing additional functionality, if it is truly redundant, you may be able to turn it off or leave it out. With chips and software, there's a little bit of wiggle room. I can reassign stuff here and there," he said. Not entirely true. Whilst the infotainment system may have enough processing power to run all the safety critical tasks, you don't want it to. Crashing your infotainment is inconvenient, but a 5 second reboot is not the end of the world. Crashing your ABS, throttle control, steering control, etc, is not an option. A lot of safety critical stuff is usually also proven with tonnes of testing (rather than formal validation) - but that testing is highly coupled to the hardware its running on. You know for example that system X will reliably poll some pin at 1k times a second, because it is the only thing running on the chip. It cannot be interrupted or delayed. The more tasks you add, the great the risk of not hitting timing targets, the larger the testing surface, the greater number of possible states it can be in, etc.