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The article touches on cost as a reason automakers eschew buttons, but I recall an interesting comment with another reason: design schedule. Changes to softwar

The article touches on cost as a reason automakers eschew buttons, but I recall an interesting comment with another reason: design schedule. Changes to software can be made at any point in the development schedule of a car, however late changes to physical buttons are very costly, potentially requiring new contracts, re-tooling, re-testing, cascading interior design changes etc.

juanani 3y ago
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DanielHB 3y ago
I work in the software side of in industrial manufacturing. In one of the products I worked in we didn't want to have a screen and buttons at all and do everything through blutooth-based smartphone app, partially because of this. Some clients demanded it so we added an optional touch-screen addon charging extra, the software in this screen is basically the same as the blutooth smartphone app (but not using blutooth). The amount of hardware problems and bad design fixed or worked-around in software is significant. If a new product is released and it is not using an existing software platform as another product it will most likely be incomplete at release. Even configuring the existing platform for a new product can be incomplete at release. I think this stems from upper-management underfunding and underinvesting in software. Most of them are mechanical engineers and don't really understand software at a deep level, tied to the fact most complex machines (like cars) are essentially a distributed system with dozens of little underpowered computers that makes building software for them harder than your average web cloud application. Software systems for hardware are hard from the get go, but don't have scaling issues that can't be fixed with bigger chips. Web cloud software is much easier (especially with cloud provider services), but scaling them to millions of users can get harder (the complexity comes in later).
- DanielHB 3y ago
  Oh and don't get me started on the underpowered chips that the procurement teams are pushing down our throats. 64kb of RAM is not okay for a system that needs to push hundreds of megabytes per month to the cloud. Procurement is always trying to cut costs for v2 and the chips are usually the big ticket item that can make into their KPIs, so it is always a fight between engineers and procurement.

juanani 3y ago

[dead]

DanielHB 3y ago

I work in the software side of in industrial manufacturing. In one of the products I worked in we didn't want to have a screen and buttons at all and do everything through blutooth-based smartphone app, partially because of this. Some clients demanded it so we added an optional touch-screen addon charging extra, the software in this screen is basically the same as the blutooth smartphone app (but not using blutooth). The amount of hardware problems and bad design fixed or worked-around in software is significant. If a new product is released and it is not using an existing software platform as another product it will most likely be incomplete at release. Even configuring the existing platform for a new product can be incomplete at release. I think this stems from upper-management underfunding and underinvesting in software. Most of them are mechanical engineers and don't really understand software at a deep level, tied to the fact most complex machines (like cars) are essentially a distributed system with dozens of little underpowered computers that makes building software for them harder than your average web cloud application. Software systems for hardware are hard from the get go, but don't have scaling issues that can't be fixed with bigger chips. Web cloud software is much easier (especially with cloud provider services), but scaling them to millions of users can get harder (the complexity comes in later).

DanielHB 3y ago
Oh and don't get me started on the underpowered chips that the procurement teams are pushing down our throats. 64kb of RAM is not okay for a system that needs to push hundreds of megabytes per month to the cloud. Procurement is always trying to cut costs for v2 and the chips are usually the big ticket item that can make into their KPIs, so it is always a fight between engineers and procurement.