Re:Tesla Accounting Chief, HR Head Resign on the Same Day; S...
by brianpgordon on Friday September 07, 2018 @06:51PM
(#17938252)
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.
Re:Tesla Accounting Chief, HR Head Resign on the Same Day; S...
by amluto on Saturday September 08, 2018 @12:54AM
(#17939476)
Software 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.
A 2016-era Model S is very, very similar to a 2012 era Model S, and a 2019-era Model S looks a lot like a 2016-era one with a less-safeguarded but comparably capable cruise control added on. The Model 3, as far as I know, is similar but hopefully has less technical debt.
As far as I can tell, Tesla leads in four respects:
- A good drivetrain. It’s impressive to build a reliable <300lb motor-and-controller-in-a-box that outputs up to ~400kW and is efficient at a wide range of operating points. But everyone else will get it eventually. As far as I know, it’s not actually that hard.
- A willingness to put monster screens and few buttons in a car. It’s unclear that this is actually a good thing. Certainly every other major manufacturer could follow suit if they wanted.
- Cruise control that claims to self-drive. Enough said.
- Cachet. Teslas are sexy.
- Superchargers. This is a big deal. The technology is boring. The fact that they’ve built and deployed a bunch of them is important.