6 ms·

VW to fire top executives at software unit Cariad, source says

78 points by sva_ 4y ago

pinewurst 4y ago
https://archive.ph/Cpynm https://archive.ph/Cpynm
Y_Y 4y ago
The real question here is, why not Toyota? Their autonomous driving division is also a trash fire. Why don't traditional car companies seem to be able to manage "self-driving" projects?
- tjoff 4y ago
  Thus far waymo is the only company able to manage self-driving projects. Feels weird to single out traditional car companies.
  - local_crmdgeon 4y ago
    Cruise is arguably farther ahead, and is owned by GM. This seems to me more evidence that the EU sucks at software
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  Best as I can tell from reporting, this is not about self driving at all. VW (which owns Cariad?) is unhappy with the pace and quality of the structural software being produced. Structural software impacts both operation of the vehicle as well as “infotainment”. There seems to be a lot of chatter that the German automobile manufacturers are hardware focused to a fault and don’t understand the needs/limitations of software development. Maybe that’s just gossip though.
  - Y_Y 4y ago
    The article states that the purpose of this new "structural software" was to enable level 4 autonomy in the future.
    - detaro 4y ago
      That's mostly because you can't run a big automotive software project and not say that, not because it's in any way doing direct work towards that goal.
  - detaro 4y ago
    Not just German ones... Generally, for a long time they treated components with software the same as any other component: You buy it as a standalone thing from your suppliers, who make it according to your specifications, e.g. lots of the electronics would come from a "tier-1" like Bosch, who many cases farm out making of different parts to their suppliers, who then contract bits from subsubcontractors, ... and in the end everything gets plugged together. The car maker at the top of the pyramid is giving some goals/designs and tests if everything fits together and shouts down the chain if it doesn't. And for physical parts and contained software that does kind of work. It involves a lot of specification writing and -checking, but that's what mech eng orgs are good at. A simple digital instrument cluster isn't that different from an analogue one in that regard, in the end it is "hardware has to have this shape, fulfill this spec, display has to read the following CAN signals to show what's needed". Similarly for a navigation system or software on a engine control unit. Where exactly the lines between what was done in-house and what is contracted fell varied (e.g. some at least nominally controlled the software platform for e.g. the navigation/entertainment unit themselves, others bought that too from the Tier-1 and ordered design customization as needed), but in general the car company is mostly doing "managing" and coordination. But this has a bunch of downsides: If you don't have the expertise in-house, you are beholden to what your suppliers can or are willing to do. If they do bad work, you can shout at them (and car manufacturers are quite good at shouting at suppliers), but you can't fix or potentially not even properly evaluate it. Integration across subcontractor trees is difficult to make work well and leads to even more spec-writing and shifting blame if it doesn't go well. Since the tier-1 is probably also not a software company, the software expertise is somewhere deep down the contractor tree and not properly involved with the high-level decisions. E.g. a common complaint is why the UI in cars is so sluggish: What do you expect if the people deciding about the hardware didn't have trustworthy input from people actually building the software and the software is a hodge-podge from multiple suppliers forced to work against interfaces one supplier made up without concern if its useful for the others... or even pass rudimentary common-sense tests. It also gets way worse the more integrated things become. E.g. if you have a separate box for the navigation system (in some cars it's literally a box somewhere you can take out and replace if you get a map upgrade, which gets power and a screen connector from the car), there's little to no software integration needed. In a modern fancy-ish car, the expectation is obviously that this is all integrated in one UI, the navigation can appear in the instrument cluster, map updates should probably be online and not require bringing the car to a dealer, you want one central computer instead of multiple small ones, ... So to stop all this falling apart, someone needs to own it. The Tier-1 could, but it also doesn't have a clue how and the manufacturers obviously don't want to give those more power, so they try to bring it in-house. But if you've never had a internal culture for software to grow this from, it is really hard to do that. VW specifically said they'd do it by force, with plans to hire thousands of software people over a few years to build a totally new software division that would own the entire stack from scratch. It's going about as well as one would think something like that would go... Other manufacturers who noticed this earlier and let it grow slowly are faring better. Some had more experimental "labs" divisions which were closer to the software world, whose expertise now can be used. Some have accepted they have to farm some of it out and e.g. adopt Android Automotive, even though the industry was very hesitant about that initially (because it gives Google all that juicy user data and ownership over the connectivity services the industry really would rather control itself).
  - konschubert 4y ago
    > Structural software impacts both operation of the vehicle as well as “infotainment”. From my limited insight, it seems that they are tightly coupling these two together: operational embedded code and the infotainment layer. So they cannot roll out a UX update without also updating the embedded code that steers the vents.
- bitL 4y ago
  I believe it's because of the top-down approach to software development. The amount of waterfall in those projects is insane and individual developers are just small cogs in the org and their input is not regarded as important. In German companies one has to be at least a PhD (preferably Privatdozent) to be taken seriously even if their PhD is completely outdated and they never wrote a line of code in their life.
  - tchalla 4y ago
    > I believe it's because of the top-down approach to software development. The amount of waterfall in those projects is insane It's more about consensus driven decision making and waiting to make a decision until all information is present : risk avoidance behaviour. You mix these two and it's a great recipe for disaster.
    - nforgerit 4y ago
      I think it's both. And ignorance/arrogance to the problem being them and their management styles. They still don't understand why they're getting outsmarted by Big Tech and China's KP. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad because of the economical downward spiral this attitude is causing.
- pcurve 4y ago
  Traditional car companies have always been terrible at softwAre development. It also doesn’t help that auto is a low margin business
  - fmajid 4y ago
    Not that low, Stellantis' margins are 30% for instance.
- revelio 4y ago
  It's not just the auto industry. A lot of industries struggle with managing software projects. If you think about it, it's the reason we have such a vaguely named thing as the "tech industry" to begin with. Tech firms are basically just normal firms that are good at managing software projects, and this skill is sufficiently rare/unique that it comes to define them. As for why that is, well, you have to work in a non-tech company for a while to really see the problems. Suffice it to say that the gap between programmers and non-programmers in how they think and understand the process of developing software is enormous, and too large to bridge. You can't explain even things that would seem obvious and basic on this forum to non-tech people, because they just immediately reject it.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    >Suffice it to say that the gap between programmers and non-programmers in how they think and understand the process of developing software is enormous, and too large to bridge. Programmers speak programming languages. Common men speak human languages. Incidentally, this is also why "AI" became such a big hit with the masses in such a short period of time: For the first time ever, common men can communicate with computers using human languages instead of programming languages.
    - ricardobeat 4y ago
      That is kind of tangential to software architecture, user interface and product development, the activities that define what the software will do. Speaking “human language” (aka user-centered design) is the utmost focus at this level. Reducing such issues to “normal people can’t understand programmers” would be best left as a trope from the early 2000s.
    - helge9210 4y ago
      > For the first time ever, common men can communicate with computers using human languages instead of programming languages. Was the same phrase used when compilers appeared? Or SQL?
    - ResearchCode 4y ago
- VirusNewbie 4y ago
  Pay. The auto industry on a whole pays not just less than FAANGMULA, but also less than banking, telco, and consulting.
  - jylam 4y ago
    No. The pay is mostly ok, the project management is shit. Basically in the automotive industry, you get important in your company when what you produce is a big part of the BOM of the car. Software is $0 in the BOM, so you are treated like shit. Source: I've worked for the automotive industry for ~20 years, on and off.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      > Software is $0 in the BOM, so you are treated like shit. So it's just bad accounting?
      - SoftTalker 4y ago
        No. The marginal cost of the software in a car is zero. There is a development cost, sure -- just as there are other design costs. But in terms of what the company has to spend to build one more car, the software costs nothing, unlike the steel, wire, tires, glass, etc.
      - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        No, it's that SW is the component on the BOM that's the easiest to offshore so it's subject to the strictest race-to-the-bottom account engineering possible. All these big auto companies like VW, GM, etc. used to do in terms of SW dev is write the spec and requirements and then contract out the dev work to the lowest bidder (Continental, Bosch, Valeo, Denso, etc.)
      - froh 4y ago
        no, it's just unintuitive but also it makes sense. first, the software is traditionally up-front cost, development cost, and as such it's not accounted for in the production cost aka BOM of an individual vehicle. but even if you'd jump the accounting hoop of spreading the software costs to the vehicles it's neclegible compared to other cost factors. VW group builds 10mio cars a year. the core ECUs board computers are shared across all models and makes. a major revision happens every 3-4 years. that's 30-40 mio units you spread the software creation costs to. the major cost (as in 90% of that) is going to be silicon, PCB, housing, the physical part. and share of ECU costs in the overall vehicle costs likewise is in the low 2 digit percentage, should it even reach that. the accounting makes sense.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nforgerit 4y ago
  Would their CEO be able to make a commit into the code base? If yes, you're fine. If they don't know what that is at all, you're screwed.
- tomp 4y ago
  "Geeks will figure out cars before car people figure out computers." Heard this quote a very long time ago, it took a while before I fully believed it, but it just keeps coming more and more true.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    As shown by Tesla being the boggest car maker by now. Oh, wait...
    - fmajid 4y ago
      By market cap it is, by a wide margin.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        Market cap is such a bad indicator for size. I don't know, maybe number of units sold might be better?
- qwytw 4y ago
  Isn't Mercedes doing relatively well? Supposedly they'll be first to introduce a level 3 self driving system at some point this year.
  - rad_gruchalski 4y ago
    Not really, limited to selected parts of the Autobahn and the car will throw you under the proverbial bus 10 seconds before it would make a fatal mistake. It’s all just PR.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
seltzered_ 4y ago
Worth noting a year ago VW AG CEO Herbert Diess was let go: https://dailykanban.com/2022/07/24/volkswagens-hallwayradio-on-the-diessmissal/ https://dailykanban.com/2022/07/24/volkswagens-hallwayradio-... Some further opinions from last year: https://twitter.com/BertelSchmitt/status/1550859623670095879 https://twitter.com/BertelSchmitt/status/1550859623670095879 And another tweet I remember about cariad and rumors around it: https://twitter.com/itskyleconner/status/1549432590553288706 https://twitter.com/itskyleconner/status/1549432590553288706
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  IMHO, as someone who worked in the German auto and semi industry, from my outside perspective, the main reason VW spun off Cariad to give it more independence form the crusty old mothership hoping this would lead to more innovations not possible within an org as big and as old as VW, and then they fucked it all up by putting the same crusty execs from the auto industry in charge at Cariad SW and it lead to the same dumpster fire as if it were part of VW group anyway, and then everyone was shocked things didn't work out the way they hoped. It's a mistake I keep seeing repeated in many big German SW companies: put in charge some old geezer from traditional industry who has a PhD from a well known German uni, who hasn't wrote any code in over 20 years, and has a top-down approach to SW dev like his team was designing car engines in the '80's. Then realize things aren't working out, give him a golden parachute and hire another overpaid crusty guy just like him but from another big company to shake up the org and ultimately achieve the same "results". Rinse and repeat. The problem is with German corporate leadership mentality which is highly traditional and therefore strictly top-down and nobody at the top is up to date on the shit-show the SW devs are dealing with in the trenches, nor do they care to address this. It's a tragedy of the commons.
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    This sounds like a very solid bet to me as well
  - imtringued 4y ago
    This reminds me of how practically all BaFin license requirements have this personnel requirement i.e. management must have three years of academic experience and three years practical experience. In other words, the only people who get to start a new payment service provider (PSP) must have already worked in management at an existing PSP, essentially pulling up the ladder.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
samwillis 4y ago
It looks like VW Group have fallen fowl of trying to combine the transition to BEVs with autonomous driving. There is no reason they should have had to wait on autonomous driving software in order to add more BEVs to their range. I don't believe autonomous driving is a deciding factor in the majority of purchase decisions at the moment, and as people tend to be loyal to a brand it's more important to get a BEV on the market that fits the category of the loyal customers. VW have a good BEV platform, perfectly satisfactory in car software, and adequate automation. It's ridiculous they haven't got an estate (station wagon) at all yet, or to have expanded those that are available to all of the various brands. None of that is depended on automation tech.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >It's ridiculous they haven't got an estate (station wagon) at all yet I think it's because consumer demand in the last decade has shifted from estates to SUVs which is horrible.
  - samwillis 4y ago
    My observation here in the UK is there may be a shift back to estates, or that may just be confirmation bias (having done just that).
    - dm319 4y ago
      I think it's just a fashion, and when people realise they get less efficiency or space for the equivalent SUV they will re-consider saloon/estates/MPVs.
  - lumost 4y ago
    I’ve wondered how much of this is a reaction to decaying road infrastructure. In the northeast, I’d be skeptical of sedan durability unless it had 6 inches of clearance. At that point, you might as well make an suv.
    - byw 3y ago
fmajid 4y ago
My brother-in-law has one of the first Porsche Taycans delivered in the UK. The software bugs were so dire they upgraded him to the next model year for free, but it's still bad. Like all the legacy dinosaurs with no clue about software, VW is so far behind it doesn't even know how far behind it is. https://mondaynote.com/code-on-wheels-a4715926b2a2 https://mondaynote.com/code-on-wheels-a4715926b2a2
matty22 3y ago
As a VW ID4 owner, I say "Good." My overall summary of the vehicle is that I absolutely love the part of it that is a car. I absolutely loathe the part of it that is a computer. The infotainment system is the worst piece of consumer technology I've interacted with in easily a decade or more. It's truly bottom tier. It would be better off if the only function it had was connecting to CarPlay and that's it. Of course, connecting to my phone via Bluetooth also takes 5+ minutes, so that is also subpar. But, it isn't only the infotainment that's an issue. The software that controls core functionality of the car is busted. Some examples: * Unlocking the passenger/rear doors. When using the key fob, sometimes they unlock and sometimes they don't. There's no rhyme or reason to what's going on. The lock/unlock capacitive "button" on the driver's door is essentially non-functional. I usually just end up leaning over and opening the passenger door manually rather than trying to figure out how to unlock it. * I've had situations where it seems like the windows operate as a boolean rather than a float. Meaning, I put the window down about 1/3 of the way. But, when I tried to put it back up it just wouldn't move up AT ALL until I put the window fully down, then I could roll it back up. Almost like the isOpen flag variable had not flipped value. * Many times I've gotten into the car and it gives me all kinds of warnings about the electrical system erring out. The only way to fix it is to put the car in park and physically get out of the car, shut the door, wait 10 seconds, then get back in. * The collision avoidance system will routinely slam on the brakes for no reason when entering/backing out of my garage. * The seat position profiles are just a cluster. It doesn't even get the seat position remotely close to where I saved it previously and setting/adjusting it is unintuitive.

78 points by sva_ 4y ago

https://archive.ph/Cpynm https://archive.ph/Cpynm

Y_Y 4y ago

The real question here is, why not Toyota? Their autonomous driving division is also a trash fire. Why don't traditional car companies seem to be able to manage "self-driving" projects?

tjoff 4y ago
Thus far waymo is the only company able to manage self-driving projects. Feels weird to single out traditional car companies.
- local_crmdgeon 4y ago
  Cruise is arguably farther ahead, and is owned by GM. This seems to me more evidence that the EU sucks at software
germinalphrase 4y ago
Best as I can tell from reporting, this is not about self driving at all. VW (which owns Cariad?) is unhappy with the pace and quality of the structural software being produced. Structural software impacts both operation of the vehicle as well as “infotainment”. There seems to be a lot of chatter that the German automobile manufacturers are hardware focused to a fault and don’t understand the needs/limitations of software development. Maybe that’s just gossip though.
- Y_Y 4y ago
  The article states that the purpose of this new "structural software" was to enable level 4 autonomy in the future.
  - detaro 4y ago
    That's mostly because you can't run a big automotive software project and not say that, not because it's in any way doing direct work towards that goal.
- detaro 4y ago
  Not just German ones... Generally, for a long time they treated components with software the same as any other component: You buy it as a standalone thing from your suppliers, who make it according to your specifications, e.g. lots of the electronics would come from a "tier-1" like Bosch, who many cases farm out making of different parts to their suppliers, who then contract bits from subsubcontractors, ... and in the end everything gets plugged together. The car maker at the top of the pyramid is giving some goals/designs and tests if everything fits together and shouts down the chain if it doesn't. And for physical parts and contained software that does kind of work. It involves a lot of specification writing and -checking, but that's what mech eng orgs are good at. A simple digital instrument cluster isn't that different from an analogue one in that regard, in the end it is "hardware has to have this shape, fulfill this spec, display has to read the following CAN signals to show what's needed". Similarly for a navigation system or software on a engine control unit. Where exactly the lines between what was done in-house and what is contracted fell varied (e.g. some at least nominally controlled the software platform for e.g. the navigation/entertainment unit themselves, others bought that too from the Tier-1 and ordered design customization as needed), but in general the car company is mostly doing "managing" and coordination. But this has a bunch of downsides: If you don't have the expertise in-house, you are beholden to what your suppliers can or are willing to do. If they do bad work, you can shout at them (and car manufacturers are quite good at shouting at suppliers), but you can't fix or potentially not even properly evaluate it. Integration across subcontractor trees is difficult to make work well and leads to even more spec-writing and shifting blame if it doesn't go well. Since the tier-1 is probably also not a software company, the software expertise is somewhere deep down the contractor tree and not properly involved with the high-level decisions. E.g. a common complaint is why the UI in cars is so sluggish: What do you expect if the people deciding about the hardware didn't have trustworthy input from people actually building the software and the software is a hodge-podge from multiple suppliers forced to work against interfaces one supplier made up without concern if its useful for the others... or even pass rudimentary common-sense tests. It also gets way worse the more integrated things become. E.g. if you have a separate box for the navigation system (in some cars it's literally a box somewhere you can take out and replace if you get a map upgrade, which gets power and a screen connector from the car), there's little to no software integration needed. In a modern fancy-ish car, the expectation is obviously that this is all integrated in one UI, the navigation can appear in the instrument cluster, map updates should probably be online and not require bringing the car to a dealer, you want one central computer instead of multiple small ones, ... So to stop all this falling apart, someone needs to own it. The Tier-1 could, but it also doesn't have a clue how and the manufacturers obviously don't want to give those more power, so they try to bring it in-house. But if you've never had a internal culture for software to grow this from, it is really hard to do that. VW specifically said they'd do it by force, with plans to hire thousands of software people over a few years to build a totally new software division that would own the entire stack from scratch. It's going about as well as one would think something like that would go... Other manufacturers who noticed this earlier and let it grow slowly are faring better. Some had more experimental "labs" divisions which were closer to the software world, whose expertise now can be used. Some have accepted they have to farm some of it out and e.g. adopt Android Automotive, even though the industry was very hesitant about that initially (because it gives Google all that juicy user data and ownership over the connectivity services the industry really would rather control itself).
- konschubert 4y ago
  > Structural software impacts both operation of the vehicle as well as “infotainment”. From my limited insight, it seems that they are tightly coupling these two together: operational embedded code and the infotainment layer. So they cannot roll out a UX update without also updating the embedded code that steers the vents.
bitL 4y ago
I believe it's because of the top-down approach to software development. The amount of waterfall in those projects is insane and individual developers are just small cogs in the org and their input is not regarded as important. In German companies one has to be at least a PhD (preferably Privatdozent) to be taken seriously even if their PhD is completely outdated and they never wrote a line of code in their life.
- tchalla 4y ago
  > I believe it's because of the top-down approach to software development. The amount of waterfall in those projects is insane It's more about consensus driven decision making and waiting to make a decision until all information is present : risk avoidance behaviour. You mix these two and it's a great recipe for disaster.
  - nforgerit 4y ago
    I think it's both. And ignorance/arrogance to the problem being them and their management styles. They still don't understand why they're getting outsmarted by Big Tech and China's KP. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad because of the economical downward spiral this attitude is causing.
pcurve 4y ago
Traditional car companies have always been terrible at softwAre development. It also doesn’t help that auto is a low margin business
- fmajid 4y ago
  Not that low, Stellantis' margins are 30% for instance.
revelio 4y ago
It's not just the auto industry. A lot of industries struggle with managing software projects. If you think about it, it's the reason we have such a vaguely named thing as the "tech industry" to begin with. Tech firms are basically just normal firms that are good at managing software projects, and this skill is sufficiently rare/unique that it comes to define them. As for why that is, well, you have to work in a non-tech company for a while to really see the problems. Suffice it to say that the gap between programmers and non-programmers in how they think and understand the process of developing software is enormous, and too large to bridge. You can't explain even things that would seem obvious and basic on this forum to non-tech people, because they just immediately reject it.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >Suffice it to say that the gap between programmers and non-programmers in how they think and understand the process of developing software is enormous, and too large to bridge. Programmers speak programming languages. Common men speak human languages. Incidentally, this is also why "AI" became such a big hit with the masses in such a short period of time: For the first time ever, common men can communicate with computers using human languages instead of programming languages.
  - ricardobeat 4y ago
    That is kind of tangential to software architecture, user interface and product development, the activities that define what the software will do. Speaking “human language” (aka user-centered design) is the utmost focus at this level. Reducing such issues to “normal people can’t understand programmers” would be best left as a trope from the early 2000s.
  - helge9210 4y ago
    > For the first time ever, common men can communicate with computers using human languages instead of programming languages. Was the same phrase used when compilers appeared? Or SQL?
  - ResearchCode 4y ago
VirusNewbie 4y ago
Pay. The auto industry on a whole pays not just less than FAANGMULA, but also less than banking, telco, and consulting.
- jylam 4y ago
  No. The pay is mostly ok, the project management is shit. Basically in the automotive industry, you get important in your company when what you produce is a big part of the BOM of the car. Software is $0 in the BOM, so you are treated like shit. Source: I've worked for the automotive industry for ~20 years, on and off.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    > Software is $0 in the BOM, so you are treated like shit. So it's just bad accounting?
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      No. The marginal cost of the software in a car is zero. There is a development cost, sure -- just as there are other design costs. But in terms of what the company has to spend to build one more car, the software costs nothing, unlike the steel, wire, tires, glass, etc.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      No, it's that SW is the component on the BOM that's the easiest to offshore so it's subject to the strictest race-to-the-bottom account engineering possible. All these big auto companies like VW, GM, etc. used to do in terms of SW dev is write the spec and requirements and then contract out the dev work to the lowest bidder (Continental, Bosch, Valeo, Denso, etc.)
    - froh 4y ago
      no, it's just unintuitive but also it makes sense. first, the software is traditionally up-front cost, development cost, and as such it's not accounted for in the production cost aka BOM of an individual vehicle. but even if you'd jump the accounting hoop of spreading the software costs to the vehicles it's neclegible compared to other cost factors. VW group builds 10mio cars a year. the core ECUs board computers are shared across all models and makes. a major revision happens every 3-4 years. that's 30-40 mio units you spread the software creation costs to. the major cost (as in 90% of that) is going to be silicon, PCB, housing, the physical part. and share of ECU costs in the overall vehicle costs likewise is in the low 2 digit percentage, should it even reach that. the accounting makes sense.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nforgerit 4y ago
Would their CEO be able to make a commit into the code base? If yes, you're fine. If they don't know what that is at all, you're screwed.
tomp 4y ago
"Geeks will figure out cars before car people figure out computers." Heard this quote a very long time ago, it took a while before I fully believed it, but it just keeps coming more and more true.
- hef19898 4y ago
  As shown by Tesla being the boggest car maker by now. Oh, wait...
  - fmajid 4y ago
    By market cap it is, by a wide margin.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Market cap is such a bad indicator for size. I don't know, maybe number of units sold might be better?
qwytw 4y ago
Isn't Mercedes doing relatively well? Supposedly they'll be first to introduce a level 3 self driving system at some point this year.
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago
  Not really, limited to selected parts of the Autobahn and the car will throw you under the proverbial bus 10 seconds before it would make a fatal mistake. It’s all just PR.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

seltzered_ 4y ago

Worth noting a year ago VW AG CEO Herbert Diess was let go: https://dailykanban.com/2022/07/24/volkswagens-hallwayradio-on-the-diessmissal/ https://dailykanban.com/2022/07/24/volkswagens-hallwayradio-... Some further opinions from last year: https://twitter.com/BertelSchmitt/status/1550859623670095879 https://twitter.com/BertelSchmitt/status/1550859623670095879 And another tweet I remember about cariad and rumors around it: https://twitter.com/itskyleconner/status/1549432590553288706 https://twitter.com/itskyleconner/status/1549432590553288706

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
IMHO, as someone who worked in the German auto and semi industry, from my outside perspective, the main reason VW spun off Cariad to give it more independence form the crusty old mothership hoping this would lead to more innovations not possible within an org as big and as old as VW, and then they fucked it all up by putting the same crusty execs from the auto industry in charge at Cariad SW and it lead to the same dumpster fire as if it were part of VW group anyway, and then everyone was shocked things didn't work out the way they hoped. It's a mistake I keep seeing repeated in many big German SW companies: put in charge some old geezer from traditional industry who has a PhD from a well known German uni, who hasn't wrote any code in over 20 years, and has a top-down approach to SW dev like his team was designing car engines in the '80's. Then realize things aren't working out, give him a golden parachute and hire another overpaid crusty guy just like him but from another big company to shake up the org and ultimately achieve the same "results". Rinse and repeat. The problem is with German corporate leadership mentality which is highly traditional and therefore strictly top-down and nobody at the top is up to date on the shit-show the SW devs are dealing with in the trenches, nor do they care to address this. It's a tragedy of the commons.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  This sounds like a very solid bet to me as well
- imtringued 4y ago
  This reminds me of how practically all BaFin license requirements have this personnel requirement i.e. management must have three years of academic experience and three years practical experience. In other words, the only people who get to start a new payment service provider (PSP) must have already worked in management at an existing PSP, essentially pulling up the ladder.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

samwillis 4y ago

It looks like VW Group have fallen fowl of trying to combine the transition to BEVs with autonomous driving. There is no reason they should have had to wait on autonomous driving software in order to add more BEVs to their range. I don't believe autonomous driving is a deciding factor in the majority of purchase decisions at the moment, and as people tend to be loyal to a brand it's more important to get a BEV on the market that fits the category of the loyal customers. VW have a good BEV platform, perfectly satisfactory in car software, and adequate automation. It's ridiculous they haven't got an estate (station wagon) at all yet, or to have expanded those that are available to all of the various brands. None of that is depended on automation tech.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>It's ridiculous they haven't got an estate (station wagon) at all yet I think it's because consumer demand in the last decade has shifted from estates to SUVs which is horrible.
- samwillis 4y ago
  My observation here in the UK is there may be a shift back to estates, or that may just be confirmation bias (having done just that).
  - dm319 4y ago
    I think it's just a fashion, and when people realise they get less efficiency or space for the equivalent SUV they will re-consider saloon/estates/MPVs.
- lumost 4y ago
  I’ve wondered how much of this is a reaction to decaying road infrastructure. In the northeast, I’d be skeptical of sedan durability unless it had 6 inches of clearance. At that point, you might as well make an suv.
  - byw 3y ago

fmajid 4y ago

My brother-in-law has one of the first Porsche Taycans delivered in the UK. The software bugs were so dire they upgraded him to the next model year for free, but it's still bad. Like all the legacy dinosaurs with no clue about software, VW is so far behind it doesn't even know how far behind it is. https://mondaynote.com/code-on-wheels-a4715926b2a2 https://mondaynote.com/code-on-wheels-a4715926b2a2

matty22 3y ago

As a VW ID4 owner, I say "Good." My overall summary of the vehicle is that I absolutely love the part of it that is a car. I absolutely loathe the part of it that is a computer. The infotainment system is the worst piece of consumer technology I've interacted with in easily a decade or more. It's truly bottom tier. It would be better off if the only function it had was connecting to CarPlay and that's it. Of course, connecting to my phone via Bluetooth also takes 5+ minutes, so that is also subpar. But, it isn't only the infotainment that's an issue. The software that controls core functionality of the car is busted. Some examples: * Unlocking the passenger/rear doors. When using the key fob, sometimes they unlock and sometimes they don't. There's no rhyme or reason to what's going on. The lock/unlock capacitive "button" on the driver's door is essentially non-functional. I usually just end up leaning over and opening the passenger door manually rather than trying to figure out how to unlock it. * I've had situations where it seems like the windows operate as a boolean rather than a float. Meaning, I put the window down about 1/3 of the way. But, when I tried to put it back up it just wouldn't move up AT ALL until I put the window fully down, then I could roll it back up. Almost like the isOpen flag variable had not flipped value. * Many times I've gotten into the car and it gives me all kinds of warnings about the electrical system erring out. The only way to fix it is to put the car in park and physically get out of the car, shut the door, wait 10 seconds, then get back in. * The collision avoidance system will routinely slam on the brakes for no reason when entering/backing out of my garage. * The seat position profiles are just a cluster. It doesn't even get the seat position remotely close to where I saved it previously and setting/adjusting it is unintuitive.