The software folks (Google, Apple) are going to figure out how to build great cars much faster than the car folks are going to learn how to build great software.
Car companies are incentivized through their engineering know-how, massive supply chains and complex dealership relations to keep optimizing complex gas engines that require significant maintenance. The software folks, having no burden of legacy on the other hand are incentivized to make the engine and car platform as simple as possible, basically an electric motor (or 2, or 4...) with virtually no serviceable parts. The cost and profit structures of the two sides will look very different, and that is going to make the customer experience much better on the "innovative" side (no more haggling the price of a car for example, 1st party servicing, etc).
Forget the Palm quote. Look at Nokia in 2007, when the iPhone was introduced: 50%+ marketshare, 100,000+ employees, 100 million+ devices/year, they already had "advanced" features like app stores and web browsers. But they were fundamentally a hardware company and supply chain oriented, optimizing the bill of materials and crippling their products to death, and could not make the transition. Not even 10 years later, they are extinct! That is what BMW and friends should be worried about.
This is missing the point that Gassée raises about software culture. It's not just a question of the software folks figuring out how to build car hardware. It's, can the software folks figure out how to make bug free software?
Most Silicon Valley "cultures" are geared towards constant rapid innovation at the expense of more bugs. Apple for instance tends to favor adding groundbreaking new features as quickly as possible, followed by a big stability-oriented cleanup release once every few years or so (e.g. Snow Leopard, El Capitan). This results in complaints about software quality, but people deal with the bugs since the features are so desirable.
It's a different proposition when bugs = people get hurt.
Not a ton of SV companies have operated in those critical environments and those that do (medical) tend to be really "boring" and enterprise-y. This is going to be AS MUCH OR MORE of a shift as learning how to engineer a different kind of hardware.
> incentivized to make the engine and car platform as simple as possible
The question at core of the post is: how simple is possible?
When iPhone launched it didn't have copy and paste. That was fine because you can iterate on software and user expectations are different. But you can't launch a car without airbags.
What complexity can the software folks eliminate and still have a viable product? The internal combustion drivetrain is a good example, though replacing it with electric has its own complexities (e.g. batteries and their control systems). But is there much more? Software-culture companies are having problems being clever with just door handles. Will you convince users they don't need reliable cup holders - a plain old boring mechanical part?
If you can't simplify much more, will just IC to electric swap make enough of a difference?
Uhm, no? Nokia was (relatively speaking) a software company. The South Korean and Chinese manufacturers, which are closer to production, excelled while the software companies like Nokia, RIM and Palm didn't. The iPhone was ahead of the market and despite the turbulence Nokia had caught up as of the N9. By then it didn't matter though. Because between Android being free and the importance of apps there were no longer much of a place for them in the market.
There are much more open questions than that. Will Google figure out how to reliably support a product for 20 years after it has been sold? Will Tesla figure out the logistics of manufacturing and marketing more than three models? (The VW group introduces 100 per year.) Will Apple figure out how to cost-effectively change winter and summer tires for all its customers twice a year? Can Microsoft become a sexy luxury brand like BMW?
Just image how fun would have been the Apple Maps rollout if it was deployed on cars. With the software glitches that has plagued smartphones in the last decade - we would have had a small genocide on our hands if it was translated on fast chunks of metal, able to kill couple of people on collision.
A single messed OTA (or heaven forbid maliciously corrupted) could inflict some serious pain.
>>basically an electric motor (or 2, or 4...) with virtually no serviceable parts.
With bulk of the people out there having no infrastructure to charge their electric cars. And needless to say if we know we are generating enough electricity to have countries full of electric cars.
In addition to the large legacy company alternatives (big tech companies, big car companies) there's lots of room for startups like Renovo Motors to innovate here. I agree the slower moving of those big companies has the most to worry about on multiple fronts.
… but does Apple’s personal computing software knowhow
translate into the high-reliability real-time code
required for a safe, reliable and, of course, elegant
electric car?
It doesn't have to. Not all the software in a car is high-reliability real-time code. My prediction is that Apple will make all the user facing software and buy all the rest.
The reason I think so is that it's not enough to write the
high-reliability real-time code. Besides thoroughly testing it you will have to get it approved by authorities - worldwide.
Proud incumbent automakers look down on the interlopers. Dr.-Ing. Dieter
Zetsche, head of century-old Daimler-Benz, has no patience for Silicon Valley
companies intruding on his turf:
“What is important for us is that the brain of the car, the operating system, is
not iOS or Android or someone else but it’s our brain […] We do not plan to
become the Foxconn of Apple,” Mr. Zetsche said, referring to the Chinese company
that manufactures iPhones.
That sounds like a Daimler car had a Daimler brain but that's just not true.
The most important ECUs are made by companies like Bosch, Continental or TRW.
These suppliers sell to all car manufacturers and they will be more than happy to
supply one more.
Thinking about it this makes me really curious how Tesla handles this. Has anyone an idea which third party ECUs from which suppliers they use?
> My prediction is that Apple will make all the user facing software and buy all the rest.
That's actually a very interesting point in light of the Foxconn comment - it seems to make a lot of sense for Apple to get the car hardware from a Chinese manufacturer, e.g. Geely.
> My prediction is that Apple will make all the user facing software and buy all the rest.
That would only make sense if there was no further development of high-reliability, real-time functions. But a lot of the opportunity for advancement involves software controlling key driving functions, not just the user interface.
There is no way to get around having to engineer bug-free code in new assisted driving features. Which are about to get a lot more complex than they've ever been before.
Maybe only partially related, but one of the things that surprised me the most when moving to the US from Germany, was seeing the large Mercedes star on one of the buildings while driving through Sunnyvale [0].
A few days later, I found myself at a BBQ filled with other fellow German ex-pats and basically all of them were working for Mercedes [1], VW, Bosch [3] ...
As it turns out, all of the big German car companies are conducting research out here.
It seems like a lot of the interesting UI and Autonomous Vehicle research is being done out here. From what I gather, they seem to think that the mechanical engineering going into these cars can be done in Germany at a level that they are happy with, but anything to do with the UI/UX and Software that controls the vehicle would be a better fit over here.
I am originally from Stuttgart, which is where Bosch, Porsche and Mercedes were founded and have their headquarters and I tend to agree. Germany is a great place to optimize an existing technology or come up with interesting mechanical changes, but dealing with something as fluent and user-centric like on-screen interfaces or the Software running e.g. the Navigation, doesn't particularly play to the slow moving German company mindset. I think that as long as there's a problem that can be measured exactly (torque, gas milage, ability to withstand mechanical pressure, ...) a German company will do a great job. For the "softer" qualities, I can see a good symbiosis with the culture out here in the valley.
That being said, meeting all of these people and seeing the companies within a 20 minute drive was an entertaining turn of events.
Based on my experience (from working there), car manufacturers often do not implement stuff themselves, they outsource. E.g. the HTML5-based infotainmemt system in the Porsche 918 was not created by Porsche (though they market it as if it was), but by S1nn.
From a software engineer perspective, if you work at a car manufacturer, you usually do not write software yourself, you're hired to write specs for external companies and verify that the results are conformant. Which honestly is boring.
The car manufacturers should react to the influx of new competitors (like Apple, Google) by becoming software companies themselves, but management is too stupid to see that. S1nn is a perfect example: Apple or Google would have bought the company right away, so should have Porsche. Guess who bought them instead? Harman.
All big players in the car industry have a research center in SV nowadays, it seems, not only the Germans. There is undoubtedly a lot of talent in the Bay Area, yet the rush of the car industry to SV smells of cargo culting.
Messrs. Zetsche and Lutz might want to meditate on Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s infelicitous words mocking the newborn iPhone in 2006 [emphasis mine]:
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
Mythicizing the iPhone is both dishonest and unhelpful. They didn't just figure it out and walk in, it took them years and many iterations to build a world class product.
Apple was able to use the wedge of UX to convince customers to but their devices and gave them time to fix the gaps in their hardware and software.
Good point, but I think they already have the culture necessary in whatever group is responsible for their CPU design. That's a low-fault tolerance environment, too.
The advantage of the incumbents is that cars, as long as they have to be driven manually, are not entertainment machines and cannot really be entertainment machines. Passengers already have their own phones etc.
I think Tesla's on to something, but it's not software. I don't think it will necessarily transfer well to Apple.
Toyota got a lot of heat over their software implementation surrounding the whole stuck accelerator debacle.
They have set the bar pretty low, despite their myriad of experience.
Pretty sure a technology company that designs cpu's for a living can do better than toyotas example of what not to do, at least in an electronics sense.
They have already hired staff that has a lot of experience in this field, and already had all the engineering chops and bank account to fund this.
While they have a lot of experience to catch up on in the auto industry, I don't think it will be amateur hour.
Has Apple ever released a cpu that had the same quality control issues as Apple maps?
Lutz also recently said he thinks Tesla is in huge trouble and that (I'm going to paraphrase here) "we tried running our own retail locations at bmw and they are much too expensive so they need to get rid of them asap".
He had an excellent run in the motor industry, but now he seems to be sadly outdated on what is happening. So I think we should all be happy to take the opposite side of his position. Which is that huge wrenching changes are coming. And not from the incumbents.
I don't see why Apple couldn't win this one as well. His criticisms are correct; ordinary software crashes all the time and people are cool with it. Heck, I even spent all of Friday discovering a Swift compiler bug. I'm sure Apple appreciate that certain kinds of software need to be more sturdy and can find the expertise somewhere.
But I don't think Apple's products tend to win because of better engineering. They somehow do OK on making the product and a stellar job of selling it. They've built a cult around their nice looking things with simple interfaces. Whenever they make something new, you can always find a friend (non technical) who praises their stuff. Undoubtedly, when they build this car, that same friend will be praising the 8th wonder of the world.
It's the Clang IR, same stuff they are making you push to the app store. Realtime software updates passed as proof carrying byte code. That's where Apple will be king, the agility to safely update.
Note the author: Jean-Louis Gassée. He's forgotten now, but he was head of product development at Apple after Jobs was fired. He left Apple in 1990, not having done much of note. He started Be (an early multiprocessor 680x0 desktop machine with its own OS), but that failed. Since then, he's mostly been a pundit.
I think you're being a little hard on Gassée. He held numerous high level positions at technology companies and worked on the Newton, BeOS, and other technology which while not market successes, were still influential. At one time BeOS was considered a contender as a replacement for MacOS.
[+] [-] Rezo|10 years ago|reply
Car companies are incentivized through their engineering know-how, massive supply chains and complex dealership relations to keep optimizing complex gas engines that require significant maintenance. The software folks, having no burden of legacy on the other hand are incentivized to make the engine and car platform as simple as possible, basically an electric motor (or 2, or 4...) with virtually no serviceable parts. The cost and profit structures of the two sides will look very different, and that is going to make the customer experience much better on the "innovative" side (no more haggling the price of a car for example, 1st party servicing, etc).
Forget the Palm quote. Look at Nokia in 2007, when the iPhone was introduced: 50%+ marketshare, 100,000+ employees, 100 million+ devices/year, they already had "advanced" features like app stores and web browsers. But they were fundamentally a hardware company and supply chain oriented, optimizing the bill of materials and crippling their products to death, and could not make the transition. Not even 10 years later, they are extinct! That is what BMW and friends should be worried about.
[+] [-] abalone|10 years ago|reply
Most Silicon Valley "cultures" are geared towards constant rapid innovation at the expense of more bugs. Apple for instance tends to favor adding groundbreaking new features as quickly as possible, followed by a big stability-oriented cleanup release once every few years or so (e.g. Snow Leopard, El Capitan). This results in complaints about software quality, but people deal with the bugs since the features are so desirable.
It's a different proposition when bugs = people get hurt.
Not a ton of SV companies have operated in those critical environments and those that do (medical) tend to be really "boring" and enterprise-y. This is going to be AS MUCH OR MORE of a shift as learning how to engineer a different kind of hardware.
[+] [-] jarek|10 years ago|reply
The question at core of the post is: how simple is possible?
When iPhone launched it didn't have copy and paste. That was fine because you can iterate on software and user expectations are different. But you can't launch a car without airbags.
What complexity can the software folks eliminate and still have a viable product? The internal combustion drivetrain is a good example, though replacing it with electric has its own complexities (e.g. batteries and their control systems). But is there much more? Software-culture companies are having problems being clever with just door handles. Will you convince users they don't need reliable cup holders - a plain old boring mechanical part?
If you can't simplify much more, will just IC to electric swap make enough of a difference?
[+] [-] gozo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hermel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] venomsnake|10 years ago|reply
A single messed OTA (or heaven forbid maliciously corrupted) could inflict some serious pain.
[+] [-] kamaal|10 years ago|reply
With bulk of the people out there having no infrastructure to charge their electric cars. And needless to say if we know we are generating enough electricity to have countries full of electric cars.
[+] [-] sgustard|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] weinzierl|10 years ago|reply
Thinking about it this makes me really curious how Tesla handles this. Has anyone an idea which third party ECUs from which suppliers they use?
[+] [-] jarek|10 years ago|reply
That's actually a very interesting point in light of the Foxconn comment - it seems to make a lot of sense for Apple to get the car hardware from a Chinese manufacturer, e.g. Geely.
[+] [-] abalone|10 years ago|reply
That would only make sense if there was no further development of high-reliability, real-time functions. But a lot of the opportunity for advancement involves software controlling key driving functions, not just the user interface.
There is no way to get around having to engineer bug-free code in new assisted driving features. Which are about to get a lot more complex than they've ever been before.
[+] [-] rb2k_|10 years ago|reply
A few days later, I found myself at a BBQ filled with other fellow German ex-pats and basically all of them were working for Mercedes [1], VW, Bosch [3] ... As it turns out, all of the big German car companies are conducting research out here.
It seems like a lot of the interesting UI and Autonomous Vehicle research is being done out here. From what I gather, they seem to think that the mechanical engineering going into these cars can be done in Germany at a level that they are happy with, but anything to do with the UI/UX and Software that controls the vehicle would be a better fit over here.
I am originally from Stuttgart, which is where Bosch, Porsche and Mercedes were founded and have their headquarters and I tend to agree. Germany is a great place to optimize an existing technology or come up with interesting mechanical changes, but dealing with something as fluent and user-centric like on-screen interfaces or the Software running e.g. the Navigation, doesn't particularly play to the slow moving German company mindset. I think that as long as there's a problem that can be measured exactly (torque, gas milage, ability to withstand mechanical pressure, ...) a German company will do a great job. For the "softer" qualities, I can see a good symbiosis with the culture out here in the valley.
That being said, meeting all of these people and seeing the companies within a 20 minute drive was an entertaining turn of events.
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3866231,-122.0357596,3a,15y,...
[1] http://www.mbrdna.com/
[2] http://www.vwerl.com/
[3] http://www.bosch.us/content/language1/html/rtc.htm
[+] [-] blumentopf|10 years ago|reply
From a software engineer perspective, if you work at a car manufacturer, you usually do not write software yourself, you're hired to write specs for external companies and verify that the results are conformant. Which honestly is boring.
The car manufacturers should react to the influx of new competitors (like Apple, Google) by becoming software companies themselves, but management is too stupid to see that. S1nn is a perfect example: Apple or Google would have bought the company right away, so should have Porsche. Guess who bought them instead? Harman.
[+] [-] dognotdog|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derwildemomo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roel_v|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paul|10 years ago|reply
Messrs. Zetsche and Lutz might want to meditate on Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s infelicitous words mocking the newborn iPhone in 2006 [emphasis mine]: “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
[+] [-] blub|10 years ago|reply
Apple was able to use the wedge of UX to convince customers to but their devices and gave them time to fix the gaps in their hardware and software.
[+] [-] tormeh|10 years ago|reply
The advantage of the incumbents is that cars, as long as they have to be driven manually, are not entertainment machines and cannot really be entertainment machines. Passengers already have their own phones etc.
I think Tesla's on to something, but it's not software. I don't think it will necessarily transfer well to Apple.
[+] [-] spotman|10 years ago|reply
They have set the bar pretty low, despite their myriad of experience.
Pretty sure a technology company that designs cpu's for a living can do better than toyotas example of what not to do, at least in an electronics sense.
They have already hired staff that has a lot of experience in this field, and already had all the engineering chops and bank account to fund this.
While they have a lot of experience to catch up on in the auto industry, I don't think it will be amateur hour.
Has Apple ever released a cpu that had the same quality control issues as Apple maps?
[+] [-] Multiplayer|10 years ago|reply
He had an excellent run in the motor industry, but now he seems to be sadly outdated on what is happening. So I think we should all be happy to take the opposite side of his position. Which is that huge wrenching changes are coming. And not from the incumbents.
[+] [-] swiley|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|10 years ago|reply
But I don't think Apple's products tend to win because of better engineering. They somehow do OK on making the product and a stellar job of selling it. They've built a cult around their nice looking things with simple interfaces. Whenever they make something new, you can always find a friend (non technical) who praises their stuff. Undoubtedly, when they build this car, that same friend will be praising the 8th wonder of the world.
[+] [-] ksec|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walshemj|10 years ago|reply
Look at finder its worse than windows 95's file explorer
[+] [-] crb002|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] venomsnake|10 years ago|reply
Do you really want the company that created iTunes for windows to drive your car?
[+] [-] bluthru|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alayne|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draw_down|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarek|10 years ago|reply