> But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.
Why? A year is a long time and it's a solved problem. In any case even if you allow the "a year is not enough" argument why didn't they start 5 years ago?
I’m not sure if you’ve worked around hardware but a year is not very long in these environments, and that 5 year plan is less like a sensible, let alone obvious step to take and more like a crazy leap of faith.
You don’t know that vertical integration will guarantee that you’re more competitive, and the investment you need to make before you see a return is beyond 5 years. That’s not an easy bet to make. It looks obvious in retrospect, but it’s really not.
It requires quite a bit of in-housing that many of these teams aren’t yet well-versed in, so as you vertically integrate you’re also disrupting your internal structure while adding new people. It’s a lot to take on. Meanwhile, there are other long term plans underway already.
Hm, reading this thread makes me realize that one of the reasons why Tesla/SpaceX/Starlink/Crew Dragon UI can move so fast is by using Linux all over the place.
Of course on itself it may not help, but along with other tricks like going agile with hardware does the job pretty well.
While others are doing their hardware iterations that last for years, software defined stuff may be easier.
Because they are not electronics companies, and further more they are terrible integration companies.
Unless the top of the company comes in and starts chopping every head that gets in the way of the new paradigm then it just ends up in locked up meetings for years of people that don't want to change.
Electronics integration isn't the problem, the people currently there are.
Precisely, such a change represents substantial risk in an incredibly risk-averse industry. People at orgs in such industries are in constant CYA mode, looking to point responsibility (and therefore blame) to anyone else.
The time to go and implement such a change probably pales in comparison to the amount of time spent in meetings getting people to agree to make the change.
It is possible to put out a fire by dumping cash on it, but there's a minimum amount that you need to dump at once for it to work. They cannot stomach the amount required, so they just feed it in one handful at a time, which of course just causes the fire to grow.
When I was working at $samsung_competitor, my NDA'd next gen android phone prototypes (a huge motherboard with a screen) were sent some years earlier. Like Samsung is on S25 now, and we would get boards for S27... It takes a long time for these things to evolve.
I feel like I'm on crazy pills sometimes when talking with people who deal mostly with software. I think SW engineers sometimes think that engineering generally looks like what they do, when in reality SW is a deep outlier wrt process...
When you design electronics you have to produce millions of, it takes a couple of dev 'spins' and usually a couple of prod 'spins' to get to the mass market board. Usually the PMs, EEs, MEs and SWEs get together and spec out a schematic, then the EEs will create the first draft of the board. There is usually extra connectors and test points on this board to ease testing and development. Once they verify it powers on, I as an embedded software engineer, start producing the software to get it running, or 'brought up'. While that is happening EE testing is going on for all sorts of things like EMI, power, communication speeds, etc. Besides the software I actually write, the chipset vendor's drivers need to be added and tested as well, there are always little things that take longer than they should. I've lost a lot of schedule to very subtle issues with chips.
As we progress along, the schematic or layout gets updated and new versions are produced. Maybe the traces need to change to reduce EMI, maybe a chipset isn't workign well or we find a cheaper equivalent and swap it out. Then once everything looks good we move to a production version, all the test points are removed, and we start putting in orders for the parts we need in volume. If you want a million of something you usually have to order in advance. Then you start bringing the factory online, helping with factory test software...and well the point is the cycle time for all this is like 6 months for a tight ship. More like a year if the kind of thing your making is novel to the team since you need a longer dev time.
For components that have many components or complex requirements, or are part of more complicated systems, this takes longer. Cars have a design cycle that's many years long - 5-6 years would be a decent ballpark. That's due to the complexity of the product, complexity of the supply chains and tooling, requirements, and scale.
steve_adams_86|9 months ago
You don’t know that vertical integration will guarantee that you’re more competitive, and the investment you need to make before you see a return is beyond 5 years. That’s not an easy bet to make. It looks obvious in retrospect, but it’s really not.
It requires quite a bit of in-housing that many of these teams aren’t yet well-versed in, so as you vertically integrate you’re also disrupting your internal structure while adding new people. It’s a lot to take on. Meanwhile, there are other long term plans underway already.
jve|9 months ago
Of course on itself it may not help, but along with other tricks like going agile with hardware does the job pretty well.
While others are doing their hardware iterations that last for years, software defined stuff may be easier.
pixl97|9 months ago
Unless the top of the company comes in and starts chopping every head that gets in the way of the new paradigm then it just ends up in locked up meetings for years of people that don't want to change.
Electronics integration isn't the problem, the people currently there are.
dansiemens|9 months ago
The time to go and implement such a change probably pales in comparison to the amount of time spent in meetings getting people to agree to make the change.
smallmancontrov|9 months ago
rapfaria|9 months ago
0_____0|9 months ago
acheron9383|9 months ago
0_____0|9 months ago
https://www.hwe.design/product-development-process/developme...
For components that have many components or complex requirements, or are part of more complicated systems, this takes longer. Cars have a design cycle that's many years long - 5-6 years would be a decent ballpark. That's due to the complexity of the product, complexity of the supply chains and tooling, requirements, and scale.
philipallstar|9 months ago
It's because these companies are more about vendor management and regulatory compliance than building things. It's a totally different mindset.