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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

I agree, and I think it's software - legacy companies suck at software and it's hard to become good at it.

Tesla is a software company that makes cars and they've gotten pretty good at making great cars.

The legacy car companies mostly make crap and their software is universally terrible*. In addition to that they're constrained by the awful dealership system and all the bad incentives associated with that.

I don't expect any of them to offer any serious competition.

*Maybe a notable exception here for Cruise which was bought by GM, but they're relegated to just one trim level on one car iirc which suggests GM doesn't recognize the threat. They also focus on high-res mapping which Tesla argues is a dead end. It's also only a subset of the problem, the car's UI systems remain bad.

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Another great software anecdote. During this chip shortage due to supply chain issues, Tesla sourced some alternate chips and updated their software in a few weeks to accommodate. Meanwhile the GMs & Fords of the world have spun down factories & sent workers home, not having the same agility.

> not having the same agility

More like for not being able to port their cobol-ass running UI for anything but the one target chip it was developed for lmao.

Probably they asked the contract software supplier what it would take, and got an answer back with too many years in the schedule and too many $ on the bottom line.

This is fascinating. Are there more details on what they did? What chips they swapped etc?

I saw a post here I believe, generally Tesla seems to have made a car from scratch with sane decisions made when Tesla was small. I've heard engineers claim that the central compute module for Tesla has a level of integration rarely seen outside of satellites.

Large car manufactures typically have empires built inside of them for major areas of the car. Transmission, engine, suspension, chassis, entertainment, etc. Each with financial budgets, staff budgets, weight/size budget for anything in their car.... yes they literally count grams. They fight for their resources.

As a result of their org tree, that impacts the design and connectivity inside the car. Often have different networks of sensors, different CPUs, even different power delivery systems.

https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/elon-musk-mindset-tesla-rec... has some details.

It's not about agility, it's about other manufacturers wanting a tried and tested chip design they know will last. Tesla is more willing to gamble, although they also removed radar from their cars to reduce the need for chips.

I don't buy this.

Is it the same reason other car manufacturers continue to use tiny shitty displays? I remember hearing similar arguments back then about that - the displays were 'hardened for cars' or something.

The simpler explanation is the other manufacturers can't adapt.

Radar was removed because the computer vision got to the point where the radar data was introducing noise and errors into the system - the quality of the sensor data went up after removing it. Karpathy's latest talk goes into this.

those comments were made after Tesla ran into problems with their consumer grade displays. Running into parked emergency vehicles also went up without radar.

If your "simples explanation" requires all non-Tesla carmakers to be incapable of using alternative chips because they "can't adapt", you should examine your personal biases.

I think Rivian might be able to pull it off.

Let’s reevaluate in ten years, we’ll see how the legacy companies are doing then.

Remember that this "chip shortage" isn't just for fancy tiny nm-process micros, it's across the whole industry. I'm in embedded systems for medical devices, and shortages of NOR flash memory, EEPROMs, oscillators, high-side drivers, ethernet PHYs, PMICs, you name it... output is just not keeping up with demand and the 1000-pound gorillas, the Toyotas and Fords and Apples and Samsungs, they make it extremely difficult when they vacuum up all the parts. It's hard to keep our lines running with our yearly quantities in the low thousands.

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