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Comment by halotrope | Hacker News Reader

Just look at Norway and the Netherlands which seem to have a 2-3 year lead on EV adoption. Volkswagen brands have already surpassed Tesla sales there. Tesla makes a terrific product and they single handedly provoked that change we are seeing now. However, the German and Korean brands make great cars too. Given the choice I would trade good build quality, some more physical buttons and a quiet cabin at highway speeds for Teslas ride and futuristic infotainment on most days.

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They are catching up, but currently the VW and other EVs, with the exception of Porsche, are pretty inferior. (A notable exception is Hyundai's Ioniq5, which is very impressive).

My biggest concern with other auto manufacturers EV projects is how absolutely abysmal these companies are at building software. It's just not even close. And software makes a HUGE difference with EVs. My wife's Audi has absolute shit software.

It's not that it's some tall order to write good software, it's just that these massive corporations have no idea how to build good software teams, period.

> My biggest concern with other auto manufacturers EV projects is how absolutely abysmal these companies are at building software. It's just not even close. And software makes a HUGE difference with EVs. My wife's Audi has absolute shit software.

A few years ago I read some forum posts from someone who claimed to be an ex-Tesla engineer that basically said Tesla was pretty bad at building software too. They're probably just better at making the UI seem shiny.

I'll note that "inferior" to somebody on HN may not be very much like "inferior" in the judgment of a mainstream consumer. I agree with you that traditional car company software is terrible. But if there's one lesson I've had to learn over and over, it's that terrible software is not much of a barrier to market success.

Most companies struggle to build well understood products like apps and web sites. The leadership of most organizations is unable to organize the relevant work because they don't know anything about such products. If a company struggles to build an app, a product like an EV is a major undertaking.

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