The success of the first iPhone or Facebook app didn't depend on using it to navigate through life-and-death situations not only for the users but also for everyone around them.
There are places for 'move fast and break things'. But cars move fast already, and they can really break things.
Every organization has these types of things internally. As an engineer, I don't like it, but it's a fact of life.
Source - https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-hit-model-3-target-by-...
We're at the point in the Tesla story similar to that of 2008 where Dr. Berry et el were watching the housing market collapse around them and the banks wouldn't re-price the swaps. Tesla is already bankrupt, most people don't know this yet. But they will.
The details matter here and given the quality that I see in the field, I'm not convinced that this is such a horrible situation.
I have so many electronic devices, from cheap to expensive, that have some passive component manually bodged on somewhere. They work fine. It just means that paying someone to rework 1000 boards was cheaper than throwing the boards away and spinning up Revision B immediately. It's not a big deal. Waste is worse than a product that is imperfect immediately off the assembly line.
Is Tesla making money?
Tesla cannot get the rest of their booked-sale cash for an undelivered car.
But they must pay all the fixed production costs anyway. In cash, creditors at this point will be getting squirrelly.
Therefore: slowness in production is the fast-track to a possibly fatal cash crunch.
It's not about money. Correcting and refacturing a board takes time, in the order of months even for a simple one. It's too long.
• In July, over 60,000 test drive requests in the US alone
• 5000 Model 3 new net orders in one week in mid-July
• Total deposits greater than total refunds in the twelve months ending April 2018
• Reports of Cancellations Outpacing Orders proved to be False wording
Meaningless negative indicators include Goldman Sachs analyst David Tamberrino saying Model 3 social media activity had lessened and frequent critic Latrilife said Tesla’s Burbank Airport lot is under 24/7 surveillance
Sources include:
• Seekingalpha.com/article/4189303-tesla-short-thesis-model-3-demand-wrong
• Seekingalpha.com/article/4179986-tesla-model-3-reservations-tip-iceberg
And - https://twitter.com/Paul91701736/status/1033136573615730688
All the first hand Twitter intelligence is gathered by people who are short on TSLA. They see the ground level reality.
It's not like those matter. The bank itself guarantees the integrity of your account and can reverse charges. And of course would be insured for such losses.
Being killed by a car, otoh, is more permanent.
Only if it's deliberately isolated in the vehicle. It should be. Aaaand, it isn't: the firmware upgrades to all other car computing elements go through it.
Can you imagine a zero day being found in Windows with Windows Update being down?
IIRC car manufactures are irresponsibly lazy and never properly air-gap infotainment from critical stuff.
Source: Done this a few times to clear bad map data or occasional glitch.
To be sure, it's a bit unsettling, and I wouldn't be thrilled about it deciding to not work for a day or two, but, in a way, it makes me MORE comfortable that the vehicle control systems function as expected.
In hot weather it can become very uncomfortable or even impossible to drive without AC.
Safety equipment must not fail, but essential equipment can fail as much as your customers will tolerate.
Our '83 Vanagon doesn't have AC, it can be uncomfortable but sure isn't the end of the world.
Because drivers can't get distracted and crash because of a failure in the infotainment and IT infrastructure?
Almost everything in a cars front panel and dashboard can be. I've read somewhere that people have been killed even because of something as quaint as the wrong placement of car ashtray.
Anyway this little illustrated anecdote of mine aside, driver distraction is a genuine issue - even for drivers at red lights. The number of times I've seen this type of behaviour transcend into moving off while remaining distracted (whether that's heads down visually or just mentally) is too boringly frequent to detail. Sometimes the distracted drivers even creep forward unconsciously while traffic is flowing across them. Emergency vehicles can't get through, drivers end up splitting their attention, pressure mounts once proper movement starts again, and all the while they don't realise they don't have full attention in a changing environment.
It's almost like a hypoxia.
Tom Scott did a pretty good video on this: https://youtu.be/_-aDHxoblr4
2. Apparently people can ssh into the infotainment system.
1 + 2 => someone hacks into the infotainment system and flashes a safety-critical ECU. I guess/hope there's some protection in place to prevent that.
An iPhone handling an emergency call is an exceptional use case.
A car driving is not an exceptional use case for a car.
A life and death scenario is occurs every few minutes, or continuously for something like a mountain road, if something like brakes, limited throttle, or steering were to fail.
But, I would, naively, assume that the operation of these critical components were in no way related to timing requirements of some process in Linux.
It seems you have to prove that failure of these hack-y systems would lead to the disastrous result you postulate.
Even PC's have now a hidden baseband processor for the mission critical stuff, like backdoors and surveillance.
Clearly when we "verify" Waymo or Tesla auto-pilot, we're going to want to use that stuff, right? Surely they won't just provide insurers with some data about the billions of miles they've driven without accidents and how humans can only drive like a million miles without an accident and try to get the insurers to give them policies...
Just like when we hand out licenses, we always check to make sure the 16 year old took some formal driving classes from professional driving instructors... I wish things were better but we don't care about this stuff as a society until much later usually. When did the car first appear? When did the first seatbelt law appear?