…because Boeing stopped being the measured and conservative company it was and began to chase profits and cut corners in a bid to undercut competition.

^I think that addition is a more complete and fair sentence.

Trouble building one of their new models to be reliable. They have several very mature lines that they have no trouble making reliable.

In terms of quality issues...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/boeing-air-canada-jet-fuel-... https://phys.org/news/2019-04-pentagon-boeing-tanker-deliver...

This is worth emphasizing. Tesla's detractors would likely give them the benefit of the doubt if Tesla had a track record like Boeing's.

Boeing's problems had little to do with being a fast-paced startup-like culture. They were outsourcing a lot of their work to India in an attempt to save money. They cared more about the short-term financial savings and cared less about the quality of work.

I think the point was to cite an opposing case where massive corporations are having issues with production as well.

Well the responders point was that Tesla isn't a massive corporation. Different scenario.

> They were outsourcing a lot of their work to India in an attempt to save money.

That Bloomberg article was highly misleading. The Indian team they cite did NOT work on MCAS and had no role to play in the accidents.

FWIW, in another article thread a poster explained that Boeing wasn't strategically outsourcing work to India:

> You have got it the other way around. TCS etc don't have that much power over Indian military contracts. Instead Boeing had to comply and open an Indian development center to win those contracts.

> I talked to couple of people at the Indian center and they tell me because the center was created due a compulsion and not strategy the quality of work is terrible. Most of them are paid well but have no work to do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20310924

If you're talking about the 737MAX, there's no evidence to show that plane is unreliable at all.

It will very reliably crash shortly after takeoff if there's a problem with the single sensor that controls the MCAS.

The problem isn't reliability, it's a fundamental design flaw (the engines being too big for the obsolete airframe design) that was bandaged with a fundamentally flawed software hack that was specifically designed to not have any redundancy and to fail easily.

The underlying cause of both companies' issues is the same, and it's not organizational size and style. It's complexity. Bugs and edge cases grow exponentially, not linearly, with complexity, and both Tesla's cars and the 737 MAX are far more complex than previous products.

It's similar to the "featureitis" that causes complex software products and platforms to crumble and die over time. Part of why we keep rewriting the universe in software is the need to repeatedly start over to escape a mountain of accreted complexity in some old system. At some point the cost of rewriting the parts we need is lower than the cost of just maintaining the bloat.

Tesla's cars are a heck of a lot less complex than normal ICE vehicles considering that they lack a transmission and emissions system.

Edit: Fanboys, this isn't an insult, it's a statement of fact. An EV simply doesn't have all the additional mechanical, electrical and software complexity that comes with those systems.

They’re mechanically less complex, but all of the complexity in a modern automobile is in the sensors and control systems. It’s the same with modern airplanes; they’re not mechanically much more complex than they were 40 years ago, but they have sophisticated fly by wire systems that didn’t exist back then.

The 737MAX is not fly-by-wire.

The problem is the automatic trim control system that was hacked on to make up for the design being fundamentally flawed (having engines too large for the obsolete airframe).

Yes, and an EV is lacking two massive groups of those systems because it doesn't have the mechanical systems those electronics control.

Edit: Why is this being down-voted? Is it factually incorrect or does it make people uncomfortable?

To the higher parent comment's point, the trade-off may not have been an equal one.

Yes, they have two less major mechanical systems. But they likely have more electronic and software systems, which tend to have more failure modes (and be more difficult to test) than their mechanical counterparts.

Back when I worked in automotive assembly, we'd did some work replacing mechanical systems with electronic controls. To a large extent, the mechanical systems, once tuned, would run indefinitely until they developed some mechanical wear. The electronic counterparts had to be re-tuned on a regular basis. The electronic ones had less moving parts, but increased complexity.

Indeed! In some ways it's a giant smartphone with a big battery and some motors added on. Considering the amount of controls, sensors, and continuous optimization for efficiency and emissions on ICE vehicles, especially when do many of them are from different vendors on pretty old standards/busses, I'd take a modern EV any day. Way simpler.

You may be right in that regard, but I would argue that Tesla is bringing a new variable into the equation which is autopilot software. I'm no expert at mechanical engineering but knowing how every major car manufacturer has mastered their transmission and emission systems, and how none of them have a reasonably full-featured autopilot solution, it does look like that variable is (far?) more complex.

They make it up with their level of electronics, sensors, software, battery technology etc.

But they don't have to add all that electronic hoohah and then construct it in a way that fails!

Come on, a car that stops when syslog has exhausted available storage! A car with continuous touchscreen failures in 2019! My GPS was bought in 2008, it has a touchscreen and it spent all its life inside a car, and it is still working, despite GPS rollover!

It's troubling that Tesla repeats mistakes that everyone else knows to avoid.