The put a non-automotive grade LCD in the original Model S because it was that LCD or nothing.

The automotive screens didn’t exist in the size they needed and they weren’t at a stage in their company where they could design their own.

They took a risk to achieve the product vision that they were determined to bring into the world given the technical constraints of the age. I’d say overall it paid off.

IMO it wasn’t arrogance.

Yeah, and their typical failure mode, yellowing around the edges, still looked better than a lot of other vehicles from its era.

I don't like their handling of it from a warranty perspective, but I'm also not sure that their initial decision was actually the wrong one.

> he put a non-automotive grade LCD in the original Model S because it was that LCD or nothing.

No. It was not no LCD or nothing. It was either an LCD that would melt in the heat of a car on a summer day, or a smaller LCD that wouldn’t.

This is just one of many decisions traced directly to Elon that fly in the face of established best practices. Lest we forget, this is a man who made the factory less safe, resulting in higher than expected workplace injuries, because he didn’t like yellow stripes and beeping forklifts. And of course the intentional misnaming of “autopilot”, and the resulting body count of the wide consumer release of its “beta” software.

So yes, it is arrogance.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-gettin...

It wasn't an unknown that the screen might yellow in high temperatures. A smaller LCD would have been a different product, and certainly an inferior product given a (diagonal) 17 inch non-automotive screen would have had to have been an (at most) 10 inch screen. It was a tradeoff, not arrogance (maybe arrogant for them not to know that jonathankoren would disapprove of it 8 years later).

> Lest we forget, this is a man who made the factory less safe, resulting in higher than expected workplace injuries, because he didn’t like yellow stripes and beeping forklifts

I can't find any news on forklift-related incidents at Tesla. If you mean reducing forklifts all together, Amazon has also designed their warehouses around reducing forklift usage - forklifts are extremely hazardous regardless of tape and beeping.

I agree, it wasn't arrogance.

Deliberately going forward with something in spite of knowing for certain that it's not fit for purpose is called engineering malfeasance, not arrogance.

> Deliberately going forward with something in spite of knowing for certain that it's not fit for purpose is called engineering malfeasance, not arrogance.

An argument can be made for both. Malfeasance in that it was a significant and potentially catastrophic engineering tradeoff due to unknown failure modes, and arrogant in that the decision valued company vision over potential consumer safety risks as well as over the expertise of the component manufacturers.

Selling something you know breaks within a short amount of time in the lifetime of a car and then not wanting to replace it is fraud.

+1. This is something software engineers (of which I am one) often miss-understand about other engineering disciplines. You can totally ship software that you know will run into problems down the line, because you can reasonably expect to solve those challenges and ship updates before they come into play. But when you sell someone a durable good that is expected to last 10-20 years (eg a car) there are a whole host of things that go into designing that thing that are not ok to fix later.

The result is that these engineering disciplines have practices that are much more rigorous. If you think about it, a recall is essentially a hardware patch, and they are typically highly embarrassing and costly.

There is also the whole separate aspect of professional licensure which certain engineers get. Licensed engineers are expected to hold their work to certain standards regardless of the business needs of the company they work for. Now i'm not saying what Tesla did falls in this category, but it certainly looks like designing a product below the standard expected for that product. (what most people would call shoddy engineering).

In software we often get away with this, because we can put in the work later on, and also because people often have insanely low expectations of how well software will work.

> This is something software engineers (of which I am one) often miss-understand about other engineering disciplines. You can totally ship software that you know will run into problems down the line ... because people often have insanely low expectations of how well software will work.

I feel like this is the self fulfilling prophecy. We definitely didn’t use to ship software we knew would break, because we literally shipped it on disks, and delivering updates was hard.

The internet has been good for many many things. Software reliability hasn’t been one of them.

You can still replace parts in physical products. For example, the yellowing screen of the Tesla could have been replaced no questions asked with an automotive version once available. It is just so more expensive due to logistics and assembly.

It wasn't designed for a car, but they did run additional tests on it.

Making practical tradeoffs to get what's important is engineering reality.

"The ends justify the means," is an epitaph on countless headstones.

Edit: Here's some food for thought. Tesla was basically forced to admit the display issue because it was so pervasive, and they basically got lucky that their display didn't cause other problems or bigger problems.

Just how lucky was Tesla? We know they're willing to take a gamble. Where else did they cut corners or skimp that we just never found out about? What else might have gone wrong? Automobiles are one of the most dangerous machines on the planet. We've also heard horror stories from former employees about working conditions, too.

People are Tesla fans because they're excited by the image. By electric cars. By the idea. But they're letting their desire to have that image in their head untarnished means they're not going to be willing to accept genuine criticism of genuine failings. Just like Apple, and Linux, and so many other products, it's generated fans who live up to fanaticism.

This is a stupid opinion. Its a display screen. Any engineer would look at the failure modes (and it was an engineer, not Elon himself) and go "we might have problems, but given the use case it's not really going to be that bad".

Elon companies have plenty of issues but the cadre of people who are insistent every issue is an unforgivable catastrophe are ridiculous.

The display screen in my 2004 Prius had the touchscreen suddenly stop working as well. Was an issue with thermal cycling with that particular part model as well. These things happen.

Sure, fine. But the MCU still crashes on my (very yellowed screened) unit regularly, randomly. Right now, that doesn't cause me to crash: autopilot stays engaged. The car continues to function. There's even a low-level beep when autopilot is disengaged, even though all other audio fails. Blinkers still work. Etc.

But the new car has removed the shifter stalk, and moved the controls to the screen. Now, if the screen reboots, I can't place the car into park or reverse. With the shifter, I can push and hold the parking button to engage the emergency brakes on the car. Can't do that if the screen is rebooting. The blinkers are now capacitive touch buttons on the steering wheel. While I imagine they'll stay low level and decoupled from the MCU, I sure hope that's the case.

The yoke is possibly the stupidest thing Tesla has done, ever. So many people are going to end up with completely shattered arms as they get into accidents and have the airbags deployed while they're turning and have their arms crossed. All for what? To look cool to a 13-year-old? Idiotic. And I say this as someone with a MS on order for September which I'm desperately hoping I'll be able to get with the regular wheel. Still bitter about the stalks, though.

There are park and reverse buttons on the center console too. (not just the screen)

People certainly get worked up about how Elon companies don't fit the traditional mold. But I think there are some good reasons why that is. Mostly this comes down to the "we'll just fix it later" mentality, but without an actual process for fixing real user devices when the "engineering tradeoffs" inevitably produce a broken experience long before an item of that quality should fail.

the second issue is that the severity of failure is not always taken into account. In your example of the Prius radio, there are several important differences IMO. The radio of a prius has much more limited scope than that of a tesla. It is a pain if it breaks, but you can replace it with something aftermarket and everything will be fine. While it is still possible to drive the car with a non-functioning touch screen, a lot more features will be missing, including climate control and the reversing camera. Additionally these units consistently failed early and Tesla initially didn't fix them under warranty.

A similar issue (failure of the display due to worn out eMMC after 5-6y) triggered a recall after pressure from the NHTSA. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262072/tesla-display-fai...

> Making practical tradeoffs to get what's important is engineering reality.

Not being aware that objects placed outdoors and exposed directly to sunlight easily reach temperatures above 80C is either a collosal design error or sheer incompetence.

Let's put it this way: for anyone to draw the line at 50C they needed to do at least a review of environmental constraints and operational ceilings, and the most rudimentary of cursory reviews (i.e., googling and looking at the first search hits) is enough to show that white objects placed outdoors at direct sunlight easily get to 80C.

It's a heckin' internet uplink dish, not a mission-critical piece of engineering lives depend on (if Starlink is your only way to call emergency services, you ought to have a radio backup).

I'm not taking about the dish in my comment, I'm talking about Teslas shortcuts.

But it doesn't really help if your poor engineering only causes your company to fail due to recall, or gets you shut down for fraud or negligence, or your product is so bad that customers entirely leave your market. That's still not something to champion.

The correct order is:

1) Start a pioneering car company in the 21st century with many incumbent car manufacturers, dealerships and regulations

2) Give business advice on (1)

They didn’t need that size, they could have gotten by fine with a smaller size just like every other car company.

And they could have "gotten by" with a diesel engine just like every other car company. that's a useless comment to make. We are tired with getting by. we need companies like Tesla/SpaceX that are willing to push the envelope with simingly stupid and useless ideas. After some time people will wander how past generations have gotten by without what they have just like now most of us can't go by without access to smart phones whereas 15 years ago everyone just went by fine.

This is just the wrong angle to look at this. The big screen was one of the features that was talked about the most. It was genius marketing, and also part of why the car felt like the future.

a lot of things can feel like the future when you don’t have to support them through their lifetime.

SpaceX and Tesla are separate companies with different employees. "They" did not put anything in Teslas.

Separate companies with the same CEO, (some) shared board members, joint projects, cross sales of services and equipment, loans of employees, etc. Surely there's significant culture bleed.

I wish more of the SpaceX culture bled into Tesla then.

Move faster, break more things? Tesla delivers far more refined products than SpaceX

Yes, break more things on testing grounds. Keep iterating until the thing works well.

SpaceX, paradoxically, has easier time experimenting and partially failing, because they mostly haul machines. Every Tesla car, OTOH, has a human pilot.

Just curious, what are the differences between normal LCD's and automotive-grade LCD's?

One thing that was shocking to me when I looked this up myself is the temperature range of a car dashboard where the LCD is mounted. It can get ludicrously hot in the summer if the car is parked under the sun[1], like 80-90 C (180-200 F) hot.

[1] https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2019/09/26/heres-how-hot-t...

Automotive-grade LCDs don't burn out and melt at the temperatures commonly found in ... well, automotive environments. Like your car sitting in a tarmac car park all day in sunny weather with the windows closed.

Tell that to my 2012 Suzuki SX4 radio LCD, it won't work when its warm out.

I've seen my 2017 Mazda LCD go into protection mode a few times. It also dims before that stage.

Certified operating temperature range would be one.

I don't know, so this is a genuine question, but is that a safety-critical part in that case? If it's not it's still not ideal, you want to make sure that your parts will happily survive the car's environment, but it's not as bad.

> Safety concerns revolve around cars losing their display for rear-facing cameras (now required by law) and consumers complaining it’s impossible to defog windshields with the center console inoperable. [0]

> Another complaint said the failure disabled safety monitors associated with Tesla’s driver-assistance system Autopilot. [1]

It looks like losing access to the touchscreen does actually effect safety components, and driver's abilities to use them. (Though I'm not clear on to what extent - driver's might just need to crack out the manual to see how else to defog, for example.)

[0] https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2020/06/tesla-investigated...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-safety/u-s-probes-t...

Safety critical? Who knows, but probably depending on how you want to define "safety critical." Tesla runs practically every user control through the touch screen. Climate control, lighting, wipers. Did they design with reasonable fail-safes? I wouldn't want to bet my life on it.

I wonder if they are doing that for other components too, or just the LCD?

IIRC there were issues with the flash memory in the media unit (afaik that means the whole giant center screen) where it would fail to boot after a while because the flash chips were failing. They actually issued a recall for that one at least.