Porsche boss faces software woes keeping VW a step behind Tesla
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Software is simply not valued in Europe, and not because there aren't amazing developers there -- there are many. But software isn't considered important
Let's start with cars. Back before cars were just computers with wheels I was briefly involved in a software project at $SERIOUS_GERMAN_CAR_COMPANY. Mechanically their cars were outstanding -- I still drive this company's cars today. This project was some cool "by wire" stuff, all modeled in Matlab, just as the ECU code was. But it was clear that the mechanical guys were the top of the pyramid; the safety guys were all mechanical engineers with some programming experience. All the user-visible electronics (radio, controls, etc) was subbed out to a low-price bidder because "who cares about that stuff anyway?". This wasn't VW, but I have some family exposure to VW specifically and that mentality still comes through deeply: electronics are added to the vehicle, not integral. The mental and organizational rewiring will be very hard. These are not companies who believe you should "eat your own lunch before someone else comes and eats it for you". The long institutional problems seen in yesterday's post about Nokia and the "Burning Platform" memo are pervasive throughout Europe (and most places, including a lot of USA): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044
You see this in the salaries. Sure, take-home salaries in the EU are lower than US ones in across the board, but the delta in the high value professions is extreme and quite telling. My son's partner's parents in Europe are offended by what Amazon pays him in the US because "he just works in IT". Well, he's a developer in their highest revenue area, so Amazon think it's worth investing in. Tesla cars ship with all sorts of fit and finish bugs, and are above average in mechanical problems. But ("FSD" excepted) they spend more of their attention on what really matters: treating their vehicle as a modern electronic device. But the European car companies are still stuck in the mid 20th century and make the opposite branch cut. The rest of European industry is the same.
Andreeson wrote "Software is eating the world" 11 years ago. Apparently nobody on the continent of Europe has read it. Sure, software is considered important, but it's just another part of the BOM, not something strategic.
IMHO the only countries that really understand software at both a technical and business value add level are US, AUS, Canada, China, with India less so but in that group and Japan just barely getting in. Pretty damning.
FWIW I've worked in France and Germany (and non-European countries), including some car business, but most of my career has been in the Valley (starting 38 years ago). I am not from Europe or USA so in that sense I don't have a preference for either side. I prefer living in Europe but vastly prefer to work in the US.
In many ways this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. An organization thinks software engineers aren't very important. And it doesn't pay the sort of salaries you need to get the top talent. So it doesn't have any top-tier software engineers, and their software team struggles to deliver valuable projects.
Later management changes their mind and decides to pay better salaries. They go to hire software engineers, and how do they even tell who the great software engineers are? Often they end up just paying more to the same not-so-great team, and watching as what they thought was an investment in software quality does not pay off.
I don't think this is specific to Europe, either - it can happen to any organization that hires a lot of inexpensive software engineers, in the US too. It's hard to get out of the "cheap software engineers" trap.
And you can see this in their hiring. All full of interns. I remember when VW was advertising a “software school”. They were bragging about teaching dozens of “software engineers”.
The people who run these businesses think that writing software is like being a mechanic. That there’s some “end state” in software. These companies have no software culture. All that matters to them, and especially in Germany, is phds. They don’t care about software, they care that they employ a high number of phds.
Funny story. I remember attending an event at Telekom some years back. People from Fraunhofer ISST were on the panel discussing how to bring quality to a major European software initiative that is currently often on the news. Another point was to come up with an idea how to run an org that can maintain said sovereign platform in a transparent manner.
I asked them a question: why not to hand it over to the universities? Why not set up a number of working groups and use it as a platform to teach competent people on a real world, high profile system. You know: r&d, devops, monitoring, service, bug fixing, new features. Sounds like a great opportunity to teach future software generations, no?
You know what was the reaction of the ceo of Fraunhofer, the said man who was running that panel? He laughed and replied: “do you know how bad German universities are?” He said that in public in front of dozens of attendees. I was left speechless.
So if add 2 and 2, you understand what is happening. Everybody is happy with the status quo.
I mean, Fraunhofer is a major German research org and it should be in their business to promote such solutions. To fire something like this out, in front of the people who definitely attended those universities, that was shocking.
To this day I don’t know if I was simply naive or if my question was stupid in any way.
Students can get doctorates directly from German universities and research is done there, but it's just not organized like American universities. Prime prestige centers are research institutes and they're spread around the country.
What is fairly common is employers reminding employees to take their vacation days before they expire. Vacation days from year n expire in April or so of year n+1. That is intended to prevent postponing vacations to never (maybe until switching jobs).
I am surprised from this quoted comment. Are German unis really bad? Why is there such a perception?
The Fraunhofer CEO probably meant that the research part of German universities is bad, which is their main "competitor". This is still a ridiculous take and I attribute this to the general arrogance that was already mentioned by GP.
Most US courses did not count as credit for my masters because they are too easy to get 100% in and they rarely cover even half of the average course load at TUM.
Though most of those measures are about research output (# papers published, # high-impact papers, # awards won by faculty weighted by award prestige, # post-docs placed to tenure-track positions, # conferences chaired, # journal editors...)
:shrug:
That's one of the things that are really hard to compare, I guess.
It shouldn't need to be said, but no amount of Nobel prizes in the world is going to make one whit of difference for introductory calculus instruction. When the prime research centers are decoupled from the universities and these silly little metrics, it's no wonder that European universities are "bad."
It's like saying that American universities are the best on the "amount spent on American football facilities per student" ranking. It's true, but the other universities might not be competing on that particular metric and focusing on other ones.
Because the culture and processes didn't change.
Seen it several times.
So it’s even worse than not valuing the work. It’s destroying it.
(By the way, it’s not only telco, but also food distribution, small business…)
https://devmynd-production-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/...
Yet even Tesla does a rather bad job at this — they consider it to be a modern electronic device and ignore the wheels. OTA updates regularly change the UI in a way that is difficult and dangerous to learn when the wheels are spinning. Even when familiar with it, the very basics are hidden in menus and cannot be used without looking away from the road for longer than is safe.
Car companies: make your car software simple, reliable, and boring. You may well need to spend serious money doing this, but the goal should not be for it to be fancy or to feel extremely modern.
(With the latest update, turning off the seat heater is buried in a menu. I still haven’t figured out how to efficiently dismiss overlay apps that are covering the map. It used to be fairly obvious.)
That's the good news, the bad news is that I still haven't figure out how to turn off the stupid cowbell when I accidentally bonk the right lever too many times. If I die in a car accident, 50-50 chance it will be because I was trying to stop the stupid cow bell. I wonder how often they run a query on post accident telemetry to see if the cowbell was on.
It's not worth it. Not in any car. Voice commands are not a justification for shitty UX. Voice commands are not always applicable.
> Once you have a grip on the vocabulary
Why can't you see a problem with this? "Instead of using proper UX in the car, be a good trained monkey and learn these incantations that may or may not work"
That’s hilarious. I’ve never accidentally triggered it. But my son seemingly never gets tired of getting into the car early and turning on “fart on turn signal”.
Anything that gets him to finish getting ready and get happily settled in the car is a huge win in my book.
Speaking is terrible for safety now?
People with speech problems.
Accent issues.
Driver gets annoyed, curses and looks at the dashboard touchscreen at the wrong moment....
And I still have to glance at the screen to see that it did what I told it to do. Especially in the case of quite frequent failures to understand me.
File a bug report. Clearly there is insufficient personalization.
“Heat my ass” works fine for me.
Please. Not just car makers, but all important software functions
This is also a reason why knobs are better. I can feel for knobs and operate them w/o looking.
What are Australia and Canada doing in there? Australia has… Atlassian? Besides that, I’ve only heard of developers in Aus/Canada/Japan being well paid if they work for US companies like Google or are parked there because of US visa issues.
Australians are well paid in general though, even if they don’t value software like FAANG does, because Australia is a petrostate pretending to be a service economy. Japan values software but doesn't pay anyone well because of the system where you earn salaryman virtue by suffering for the first 30 years of your career. (Hot takes.)
Australia has much more than just Atlassian. Canva is the 9th most valuable private company according to crunchbase [1].
But you need to look deeper than just "who has the biggest most successful companies. Note, the comment says "countries that understand software".
From what I've seen, and one of the reasons I moved here, Australia values quality production. They understand where software drives business and invest in that.
I'm former NICTA/CSIRO, and those organizations used to be drivers of technology and research.
Canada is a major technology hub. Microsoft and Facebook both have major development centres in Canada. Of course, being so close to the US, most of the brain drain goes directly out of the country, but that is part of the country and the people understanding the value of software. The education is good, and so people go to where the dollars are.
Canada and Australia are not going to be able to compete with the US from a dollar perspective. So many of the best Canadians, Australians, Chinese and Indian are going to end up in the US.
[1]https://www.crunchbase.com/lists/crunchbase-private-unicorn-...
It's not the SV of the north yet -- local VCs are still a joke (expect one to two orders of magnitude worse terms) but it's getting better. The angel scene has actually been pretty incredible over the past few years.
This is how Microsoft drove their phone business off the cliff: they built a product that their customers (corporate IT) loved but the users detested. When the iphone showed up Microsoft famously knew it was dumb because it addressed nothing that their customers cared about. But the workforce demanded change.
Come now, it’s more of an iron ore or coal state than an oil one. Beef is more of their exports.
> The top exports of Australia are Iron Ore ($79.6B), Coal Briquettes ($36.4B), Petroleum Gas ($26.8B), Gold ($17.7B), and Frozen Bovine Meat ($4B)
Japan considers programming a blue collar task so pays accordingly (though there are exceptions, like Sony Computer Entertainment). But culturally the companies tend to understand the role of software better and have for a while. Remember how great the Keitei were in the late 90s/early 2000s compared to anywhere else in the world?
There are a lot of interesting lessons in video games though; it’s the only kind of software people love using enough to write emulators for, and game developers seem to exist in a lot more countries than other software businesses do.
Finally, they made very crappy Android phone and local industry shrunk. So Japanese consumers now love iPhone because Android phone is a trauma for some of them.
There are plenty of wellknown tech/software companies originating in Australia. Xero, Freelancer, Canva, REA Group, MYOB, Airtasker, BigCommerce, Afterpay...
Many foreign software companies have development teams in Aus as well. Google, Zendesk, Square, Squarespace spring to mind.
https://www.smartcompany.com.au/technology/the-top-50-tech-c...
But when looking at living there, the wages/housing prices seemed like a poor trade off even compared to California. Although of course it’s a great place to live in many other ways.
I’ve heard of some of those but haven’t looked up their pay bands, not sure Afterpay has a moat though…
> Google Maps first started as a C++ program designed by two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen, and Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, at the Sydney-based company Where 2 Technologies. It was first designed to be separately downloaded by users, but the company later pitched the idea for a purely Web-based product to Google management, changing the method of distribution.[9] In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google Inc.[10] where it transformed into the web application Google Maps.
For some inexplicable reason they have a web browser in the car. Every time I've tried it it crashes the Tesla's computer. Even viewing the Tesla manual reliably crashes the Tesla's computer.
If Apple really is working on a car, and if cars really are now just computers with wheels, then it's not at all clear that Tesla has the software skills to keep up with Apple (or whatever company actually has the skills).
You can probably say the same about GM or Ford, and I'd extend this to companies that sell hardware products in general. In the US too, the hardware department of many hardware companies runs the show, even though the hardware sold still runs a lot of custom software.
Tesla was shaped by a guy who got rich thanks to having founded a software company, and he brought those practices to hardware. It's the exception rather than the norm.
So the question should be, with Tesla and Rivian both being pretty young, where are the european startups? There is so much expertise in Germany for building cars, you would think that it is the best place to found a car startup. But where are they? DHL couldn't find a single German buyer for their car company.
The interface, while not perfect, is not the kind of OEM junk I’ve seen from others. They’ve got working OTAs, although it’s going slow and they’re learning.
They may end up outsourcing a lot of that to Google’s Android based car platform (also called Android Auto?).
But they seemed to have learned from Tesla it’s an integral part of the car these days and not something you tack on at the end. It will take time but they are genuinely moving in the right direction at a reasonable (but not fast) pace.
Precisely because they have the expertise they don't found startups. After founding an air company it's the second quickest way to become a millionaire if you are a billionaire. Tesla only became profitable in 2020 on the back of some government credits. 17 years after founding.
Remember Tesla's screens breaking because they used regular LCDs that couldn't withstand the vibrations and temperatures in a car? Yeah, that comes from expertise.
I once mentioned this meme (referring to a specific anecdote) in a small group of CS people, and the big-name CS professor in the group immediately agreed with it, saying "They are our worst enemy!" (I think he was referring, seriously, to everything that has been learned, in his fields of CS and Software Engineering, beyond what needs to be exercised to get a program to compile and initially seem to work.)
My theory about that meme: all EEs (for example) will have done some programming (in some cases, like someone who can write numerous paragraphs of English, but isn't even aware of the gap between that and a great novel). And EEs might also reasonably have the impression that "coding" is easier than the hard real engineering classes that the EE had to pass. Of course, it's clear to everyone that CS people couldn't do the jobs of EE people, but it's less clear in the other direction.
To the extent that the meme is sometimes true, I think current market realities don't break it. A company driven by people with hard engineering/science backgrounds might realize it has to pay some market rate for software people. (And if the product obviously needed some kind of clown college skills, like face-painting, they'd pay for it, even if they thought those clowns had it easy.) But that doesn't mean they understand what's involved in the craft of effective software engineering, nor respect what goes into software staff's processes and judgment.
This isn't only about hardware and software people. I think it might be a more general human problem, across disciplines. It makes sense that software people will most notice the version in which they're on a receiving end, which I'd guess is usually on the other end of hardware people or (like most everyone else) business people.
(Additional theory: if an organization doesn't understand and respect some skillset, they might not be able to discern strong candidates when hiring for roles needing that skillset, and random results could be self-reinforcing.)
Of course a meme isn't truth, and it can be unfair to individuals. And some of the best software work I've seen was by people with EE/CE/math/no degrees, and I was also blessed early in career by working with great hardware engineers who did respect software.
The tooling and the culture in the software world is decades ahead of fields like engineering or business management.
Take ideas like version control - a way to do change management. Open source. Test driven development. Continuous integration. These have existed in a nascent way in other fields, but software engineering has really taken the ideas to the next level.
I know some new hardware companies that have taken these approaches to their whole integrated hardware-software development methodology, with extreme success.
So it seems we need new car companies in Europe, and at least one founder probably needs to have used git.
TBF version control started (SCCS, RCS etc) by modeling how version control was done in mechanical engineering and architecture. Just look at the manual version control in old blueprints. Nowadays CAD systems like solidworks have a VCS for your models too. Absolute shit based on proprietary MS file formats, but it is there and it works.
OTOH there are reasons why you can't do TDD in the physical engineering, much less CI. When you're building a bridge you have to do FEA on your design, but the cost committment of construction doesn't allow much incremental change as you go -- almost all is in response to problems found once you've started building.
Code review is inherited from practices of other engineering disciplines.
Just this week I called out a mobile mechanic from our state automobile club here in Australia, to replace the battery in my old 911.
He was really nice bloke, older guy, and we got chatting about cars.
Now he reckoned that he has the most problems with European cars, most of which are considered premium or mid level brands in Australia.
Always putting Euro cars on the back of trucks he said, because of problems with the electronics.
Japanese cars were still the best, and never once had a problem with the Hybrid System from Toyota!
They are simply not made for the conditions here.
My old '99 model Porsche 911 996 is an exception to the rule. It's free motoring at this point; price rise since I purchased it 4 years ago has covered the cost of all and any expenses, including fuel and insurance.
Of course, the 996 was conceived in Porsche around the same time the Japanese came over and helped them out! They were in big trouble before they modernised.
Maybe this is a wake up call to the Germans to get in gear and sort themselves out before they run into (even bigger) trouble again!
Was this a surprise to you? Here in the US it's well known that European cars (including the expensive brands) are across the board worst in reliability, Japanese cars are the most reliable, and the US brands are in between.
But interesting that a professional expressed the opinion so readily.
TBH I don’t really tend to hear much about mainstream modern cars in my day to day life!
I do recall the hosts of the Accidental Tech Podcast (Marco Armant and Friends) complain about BMW reliability.
We had an Audi Q5 first and a Tesla second. My wife and I fight over who gets to drive the Tesla.
With a modern German car, you still get some the fancy features, but they don’t work very well (lane control comes to mind), and the electronic UI is much worse than Tesla. CarPlay is the only way out.
And let’s not even talk about the difference in driving fun.
EDIT: And now imagine what happens when the German drive to over engineer stuff, we do it with everything, not just hardware, meets software development for a complex system like a car... Then you get, well, VW.
I see this attitude in many domains, even among younger generations in startups where the majority of co-founders aren't developers, or after the original co-founders are sidelined by business people.
Software is just considered a necessary chore needed to do business, almost never a core part of the business with inherent value.
It's one of the reasons why Europe has almost no significant players in the IT space.
Europe has something like six companies in the top 100 software companies when ranked by market cap and only one in the top 10 (the german SAP).
That's hardly being a "significant player in the non web / non ad space".
I do agree so that in Germany software as a stand alone thing has close to zero perceived value. If it is embedded in hardware, sure, it is important. Not as important as it could be, and it will always be seen as one part of many.
When it comes to stuff like MS Office, software is a tool, nothing else. As long as its working people a re happy using it.
The big devide, and I think it is a HN thing mostly, is how much importance software is given by people. Obviously, HN is giving it a lot.
Are Ford and General Motors better at this than the European car manufacturers?
Maybe it is also caused by people staying very long at their employer in Europe. It is not uncommon to stay till retirement after you got into a big cooperation.
Ford and GM seem to have had a “Come to $DIETY” moment but yes, it remains to be seen if they will get their act together.
Ironically it was Mercedes who was the first to open an office in Palo Alto back in the mid 90s. It was considered absurd at the time, but all the other car companies now have offices in the Valley. But none of them are integral to their parent companies. Mercedes squandered their lead.
I'd take clunky old software over "all sorts of fit and finish bugs, and ... above average in mechanical problems" any day.
Now even in the US I think you see this with data. You see companies with managers brought up through software ranks that don’t understand how to measure and optimze systems and orgs with data (machine learning, but not only machine learning). They want to build complex software, often at the expense of the user experience, that just wants the thing that makes them think less…
This being the case, it's not surprising that people don't understand the value of things: while they use Apple/Android etc. their immediate association with "IT" is that lowly dork who fixes their computer.
You see this in India too. From a industry full of low-level "IT-coolies" a few decades back, the aspirational places to work now are the "product" companies, where you don't just do grunt work.
It's literally just a cultural issue that they think of themselves as car companies first, and good software culture isn't in their corporate DNA. 5-10 years ago literally no one understood that, but most executives are starting to get onboard with the need for changes and flail their way through them.
We're paid pretty low in Canada as well. The two devs that started at the same time I started my career had a salary of $11/hr ($7.62/hr USD), both of whom are quite talented. My salary when I stopped being doing testing directly was $52,000 at 9 years of experience. Toronto and Vancouver pay better but the cost of living there is quite high unless you already own the house you live in.
1) Near monopoly in that sector 2) Excessive surveillance and tracking users 3) Increasing inequality between haves and have nots.
And non-FAANG type IT worker are also paid relatively high at the cost of other workers living perilous lives.
So unless Europeans really start cherishing these "values". They are not gonna get US level salaries. The way I see quite a lot non-US / European people just like high salaries but never want to think where it really come from.
All this talk about Europe does not respect/appreciate / values Software engineers sounds more and more like coded way to say We, software people, deserve much higher salaries at the cost of everyone else.
This is an absurd and lazy take.
There are plenty of high paying software jobs in the US that have nothing to do with surveillance (e.g. the AWS part of Amazon, Apple, SpaceX, all sorts of robotics companies, etc).
Europe's concerns in this area are a strength that they should be taking advantage of.
FWIW I think the surveillance itself is lazy. People just collect stuff because it's cheap to do, but the evidence that it is that useful in most cases is scant. If the FTC took a reasonable position that just having that info is a liability to be managed, most companies would stop and their businesses would do fine.
There is a yawning cultural divide between the USA and the rest of the world. Especially the non-English speaking world.
I am in an English speaking country that slips under the shadow of the cloud cast by the cultural hegemony of the USA (Aotearoa) and when I look around at my lifestyle, my friends, community, and the problems we have as a country and society - salary would not be enough to move me.
I am grossly underpaid by any standard (working on it) but the compensations of lifestyle and culture are well worth it
There's nothing wrong with making such a decision. Many others make such a decision, whether in an English-speaking country or not. In the US itself, many make such a decision to stay in their home cities and states as opposed to moving to Silicon Valley.
But you also must recognize that you are in the minority. It is a fact that FAANG and comparable companies' Canadian offices are almost entirely staffed by non-Canadians that are parked there because they are either waiting for, or cannot receive, a US visa. Yes, there are some Canadians who want to stay close to home in Toronto or Vancouver, but they are very, very, very few.
Canadians have, thanks to treaties, a pretty simple path to working in the US. I think Australians also have a unique treaty in this regard. All other nationals have, to greater or lesser degree, various hurdles to clear before moving to the US. If tomorrow New Zealand signed a treaty with the US that made moving to the US for work as easy as it is for Canadians, how many of your coworkers and peers would stay?
And there are hundreds of companies that pay at that level in the US, not just FAANG.
Reality is European workers are under-paid, not US workers over-paid.
Also curious what you think is different in Australia? Are software salaries there like in the US and above somewhere like London?
My point was that European workers are paid in proportion to how they are valued by their employer. If they wrote transformational software their employer wouldn't understand its value and it would either just be shipped without a lot of thought, or ignored. Come to think of it this may be why so much great open source software comes out of Europe.
If European companies threatened by the digital transition realized their looming doom and actually decided to do something about it, the salaries would rise as a consequence.
Not very familiar with Australia. But thinking that high paying company like Atlassian which produces a very crappy software which I unfortunately deal daily. To me it shows high pay does not guarantee good quality software which many(not you) seems to be arguing here.
That's a different problem. That's because you, the user, are not a customer of Atlassian. Companies and their micromanagers, however, love JIRA.
Microsoft is in the same boat. Virtually no users of their products are actually their customers.
That's how you get away with producing very crappy software, even if you hire the top talent.
Such a weird logic. You’re saying that Microsoft produces crappy software even though they hire too talent. And they get away with it because the people who buy it don’t use it (i.e. by extension don’t care if they’re spending their money wisely)?
What's wise for the management isn't necessarily wise for end-users.
You can buy a product that's great for your business needs, that the users will absolutely hate. Both of those things can be true at the same time.
Apple has less than 10% of the PC market. What do you think the rest of them are running?
If you didn't pay for your copy of Windows (which you most likely didn't, far more likely it was provided to you in another way, such as OEM or your employer), you are not Microsoft's customer.
Likewise, if you got the free license from upgrading, you're also not their customer.
Pirated Windows? Not their customer.
Bought one of those $20 license keys? Still not their customer.
Actually bought a Windows key directly from them? Okay, you're their customer. You're in the minority.
I certainly don't agree with your definition of a customer. People who buy a PC with a Windows OS on it know it's a Windows OS, and make that choice willingly. It's like pretending nobody is an Android customer because they buy their phones from Samsung not Google.
If you use Microsoft products you are their customer.
Splitting hairs is a bit silly
Microsoft was taken by surprise by the “BYO movement”
They did still eventually address the root cause with WSL/WSL2.
IT chose it, eng can't seem to object.
They are. Most US "innovative competitive startups" are losing hundreds of millions, and often billions of dollars a year, for decades.
Europe (thankfully) doesn't want to do that. And "grossly underpaid software developers" enjoy a high quality of life on par with the rest of the population (universal healthcare, extended parental leave, vacations etc.)
That isn’t actually true. A few certainly are, and they make great press fodder. But most don’t have that luxury. Actually it’s a burden: you suffer much more dilution.
The ones HN like to point at usually are. E.g. basically all of YCombinator companies.
> But most don’t have that luxury.
Thise that don't have the luxury are likely to have salaries more in line with European counterparts.
It is because if all the computer programmers went away the world would limp on. If all the janitors went away we would be swimming in shit.
Supply and demand.
Except that should you need surgery, you'd care who the surgeon would be, but not who would be handling the bags of medical waste.
Those workers live perilous lives because cities refuse to build enough housing, not because a few workers have it good.
> those outrageously high FAANG salaries occurs because of
4) Much more generous VC funding leading to more competition between firms for SWEs, as a result of a more risk seeking / risk tolerant culture with stronger work ethic
Also you're ignoring that even SWEs at companies like Walmart Labs make much more than SWEs in Europe.
Good. Find out how Walmart retail workers are doing. And Housing in US is lot cheaper for majority of people.
> ... risk tolerant culture with stronger work ethic
Yup, from Uber to Wework and dozen more food delivery service did awesome job with generous money in creating enduring businesses with strong work ethics.
Plenty of other examples of well paid workers and US SWEs paid more than EU SWEs. UPS teamsters are unionized. AT&T technicians are unionized. Both pay their SWEs more than EU companies by a substantial margin.
> did awesome job with generous money in creating enduring businesses with strong work ethics.
You could name companies which are actually changing how (European) companies operate. Zoom, Slack, SpaceX, Figma, the list goes on and on. None of which were started in Europe.
32 hours a week and 60k EUR/year doesn't cut it in a competitive market, and any founder will tell you that.
> And Housing in US is lot cheaper for majority of people.
Not in any major city. Clearly you don't live in the US.
Huh, lived in upscale DC suburb for many years, now moved to different city. Housing seems lot cheaper here when I checked with some friends based in some London suburbs. Another one with house in Amsterdam almost sounded same price for half size house than I bought. But yeah, no public transport for me and I am like 10 miles from downtown :(.
Perhaps your expectations are calibrated based on European cities which also have housing shortages, like Berlin and London.
“Oh, all of those people making way more must be immoral.”
You’re spot on.
I testified along with fellow owners to the NHTSA and got all Taycans recalled. The arrogance and denial that Porsche put owners through was shocking through the process. They displayed a complete lack of understanding of the basics of control systems and software safety.
Needless to say I sold the Taycan and would never buy a VW electric product. I wrote them a letter and spoke to the safety team saying people will die from this sloppiness and lack of professionalism. Someone will pay. Turned out I was right
Is there a report somewhere / investigative details on the recall? Thanks!
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/porsch...
——
EDIT
I found https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2021/RCLRPT-21V486-3851.PDF
“Due to a software issue that has since been corrected, the software designed to continuously monitor end-to-end communication between the safety-related ECUs in the vehicle can, in certain instances, incorrectly and sporadically detect a potentially faulty communication, set an error memory entry, and trigger a shutdown of the power train, resulting in loss of motive power.”
When advised cars were bricking on the highway, the report states “Porsche did not consider this a safety concern”
(I had an affected diesel engine, in Australia the process to be compensated was an absolute disgrace).
My other owner friend was in the fast lane in front of a semi, almost was roadkill.
I have been driving an VW ID 3 since last year, it runs their custom Android OS System and should have all of the latest features. It has been quite an experience.
The car is fine, basic driving functions are fine, even the driver assist features are generally fine if they are running.
The software running all the displays and the "augmented" heads up display is ridiculous.
The car one did shut down all displays (including speed) while driving on the Autobahn (error message: no input), I stopped in the next town, charging the car was no longer possible. I tried to find out how to do hard reboot, my wife found a thread in a forum, "leave the car with all smart keys, go at least 50 meters from the car, wait for 15 minutes". That did the trick.
Sometimes the voice recognition comes on and does something weird, I have no idea why or what it tries to do, sometimes it starts a specific radio station, it has not once recognized anything I said.
Some Update added a blue light glowing in front of the driver in the small LED strip, it just ominously glows for a second. It looks a bit like a warning, I have no idea what it is warning about, it just happens sometimes.
Sometimes in the night the alarm starts and wakes the neighborhood, but I was able to solve that by disabling the proximity features in the smart key system.
The navigation forgets that I can charge the car at home after every update. 20 kilometers before I am home it recommends I should charge for 2 hours.
The UI/UX is unintuitive and ugly. It shows a lot of useless information in weird places and a lot of stuff is hard to find.
The list of weird experiences I had with this car is endless, and a lot of is just just bad software development, like the issue on the Autobahn.
Sometimes the radio doesn't really get a good signal on Radio 4 and I need to press the SEEK button on the steering wheel.
The dashboard displays were fuzzy and hard-to-read, but I wiped the dust off and they were fine. They did go totally dark once when I was fiddling with the brightness control, but I turned them back on.
It has never need rebooted. It has never forgotten how to be fuelled up. It has never just turned off all its electronics at speed on the motorway. The UI doesn't show any information beyond speed, engine RPM, coolant temperature and fuel level, unless there's some sort of fault indication up.
I am really not convinced about buying a modern car.
(My last car was also a 27-year-old Range Rover, which I still have)
Let’s not get overly nostalgic for the incredible mechanical complexity of ICEs.
If you can't control a car with dead power steering, you can't control a car. Power steering only makes a difference at parking speeds.
In a relatively large vehicle - say, a VW Amarok - power steering provides significant moment on the steering that is immediately and unexpectedly removed when motive power is lost. While the car is arguably controllable, I was shocked at how difficult it was for me to maintain directional control when it happened to me, and I’m a pretty big guy.
In fact, in my case I just stalled it. The twin turbo 4cyl engine had a very steep power curve and it was easy to pull the clutch at just the wrong RPM, before the turbo kicked in. Especially if I had been driving something else. So - there’s a failure mode triggered by simple ergonomics. The combination of an unexpected stall during acceleration also presents a heavy driver workload, as I discovered more than once.
The brakes are also powered by the engine and it requires very significant additional force to stop a large car whose engine has just quit unexpectedly. I’m not sure that everyone who drives such a vehicle could recover if the failure happened, say, at a busy intersection.
All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t be nostalgic about ICEs. There are far more failure modes for them, all of which can lead to engine failure and subsequent controllability issues.
No vehicle has brakes "powered by the engine". I'm not sure if you're maybe not quite explaining what you mean clearly there.
When the engine stops, no vacuum. No vacuum, no assist. The brakes in most of the cars I’ve driven become substantially more difficult to use when the engine is off.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_servo
https://auto.howstuffworks.com/auto-parts/brakes/brake-types...
https://didyouknowcars.com/the-history-of-power-assisted-bra...
Many really modern cars have gone back to the old WABCO-style electric pump that will pressurise the braking system as long as there's power in the battery, because that whole thing plays more nicely with hybrid drivetrains.
But it is all beside the point. It’s easy to point out problems with BEVs because they’re new, but ICEs are far more mechanically complex and are therefore also subject to many kinds of failures. Simply because they have fewer moving parts, complete loss of power in a BEV is far less likely than in an ICE. This is why I said that we shouldn’t be overly nostalgic for ICEs.
Perhaps you’re just overly focussed on my throwaway line about “blowing a belt” - ICEs can also fail from a damaged cam, valve, pushrod, crankshaft, distributor, piston, timing chain, injector, air intake, turbo, fuel pump… I’m not really sure what your point is other than to nitpick at my example of one of the literally dozens of complete power failure modes of an ICE.
Some engineer actually coded for this - LOL.
This strategy often fires back as the customer base grows, because customers want software that actually works. Paying your tech debt is not feasible when your engineering department is small and they are also expected to build new features nonstop.
Unfortunately, most of these companies react by partially or completely outsourcing their bad software to bodyshops at developing countries. Those companies maintain the initial quality at best -which was already poor- and at worst they keep making it worse until it becomes unmaintainable and it collapses on itself.
The biggest problem of them all is Europe's failure to learn from its own mistakes. This pattern has existed for decades now but it keeps getting worse.
There is of course the notion that Silicon Valley has produced a lot of amazing companies. But it should be noted that a lot of these companies are staffed, and lead by people from all over the world. E.g. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels is from my home country the Netherlands. Both MS and Google have Indian CEOs. etc. And of course US companies have long been outsourcing just about anything complicated to India, Eastern Europe, China, etc. That's not just European companies doing that. That game was pretty much invented in the US.
A lot of silicon valley based companies have most of their development departments in different continents. Mot surprising, the local market is very expensive and you can get a full team for the same money that a single developer costs there elsewhere. And you'd be wrong to assume the local developers are better/smarter. There are of course a lot of talented developers there. But I've worked with and been impressed with teams all over Europe. And I've dealt with some US companies where I wasn't so impressed with their engineering.
The state of software development in legacy car manufacturers is not good. That's simply because they are historically not software companies and they are all struggling to adjust. What little remains of the US car industry after the Japanese and the Koreans took over is basically being disrupted by Tesla just as badly as the European manufacturers.
Ericsson's and Nokia's software divisions are offshoring bodyshops at this point. They do the complex RF R&D in Finland, Sweden and Germany and the software/firmware is offshored to Eastern Europe and India.
The thing with Eastern Europe is, it's still a hub for body shops mostly. Sure, there are also big names there working on cool products thanks to remote jobs and offshoring from the tech scenes of other major tech hubs like SV/London, etc. but most of the jobs are still body-shop style.
Traditional European tech companies in a nutshell.
Did you mean "average European software company"? A lot of the German Mittelstand companies are the opposite. Instead they sell into a niche through trade shows (another thing probably going away).
I do. My area has Mitteltstands as well, mostly in biochemistry. I had a bizarre experience interviewing for one of those where they posted a Python job offer but they actually wanted me to write Java and a dozen other things on top of it.
Especially germans are too stuck in their industrial past - we don't really understand the value and leverage of software for business cases.
The car industry is built upon great designers and engineers, outsourcing the actual production of parts to other entities - they're not really used to building anything on their own, they just assemble things. I've written about this here [1].
While this way of thinking isn't limited to automakers, they're the ones that will suffer the most from it in the future. True innovation has been lost to the industry decades ago and is additionally blocked by holding on to the status quo instead of experimenting with and developing new things.
I believe this stems from the fact that most of our big businesses are run by MBAs with no real understanding for trends and even less for the speed at which the world moves forward in terms of technology.
Diess himself at least tried to push something forward others have neglected since the 90s. Not sure how Blume will approach this, but since he's grown inside the VW bubble for almost 30 years I would not assume that he can drive any kind of real innovation forward.
[1] https://derfabianpeter.substack.com/p/europe-and-the-cloud
The impression I have is that Tesla software is fucking terrible, generally. I'm sure there are some smart folks there and I don't mean to disparage anyone working there but, the stuff I've seen or heard is enough that I would never purchase one of their vehicles for those reasons alone.
That being said I've worked with even fewer folks from other automotive companies, and the impression I get from them is that for the incumbents it's nearly as bad as one could imagine, so the article doesn't surprise me.
All of which makes me pretty sad. My most recent vehicle purchase was largely driven by the desire for the least "smart" features possible. But why is this?
In software, the closer to metal you are, the harder the problems are (mostly due to constraints) but the worse the job is -- pay, culture... it's all bad. Why?
Not saying it’s universal, but I’ve seen this being related to lacking economics of scale. You write software for a limited fleet of widgets and have to constrain your expenses.
Most cars have shitty, laggy IVI that will get no meaningful updates. You are on many cases almost forced to use Apple/Android Car.
Teslas give you more of an Apple treatment. You will receive meaningful updates for years. It is mostly fluid and good looking. It is exciting for the people looking for the latest gimmick, the same way people look forward to iOS 15 or whatever.
What is the cutoff for Tesla cars receiving software updates? Are the early models no longer supported?
(1) Cars that old come with what’s called MCU0 or MCU1. They’re both running on a Nvidia Tegra chip. MCU2 uses Intel Atom and MCU3 uses AMD Ryzen. For 1500 euro you can update on any car from MCU0 and MCU1 to MCU2. Even the old 2012 models.
(2) Tidal was already available for newer cars with MCU2 since end of ‘21.
Here's a tip for all the backwards big companies in Europe: pay your software engineers a lot more. Whatever you're paying now, increase it by 2x-3x. If you want the best, you're going to have to pay for it, or you're going to suffer the predictably mediocre results indefinitely (to the benefit of Tesla & Co.; Tesla's sales are now up to $67 billion; that's closing in on the size of BMW's consumer auto division).
cf my long comment on this subject.
Why is Shake Shack better tasting than McDonalds? All they have to do is pay them better!
Why did Nokia fail when the iPhone launched? All they needed to do was pay devs better, duh!
Chips and software, software and chips. Access to chips and good software make all the difference.
If so, you're likely tired of the "German engineering" myth. Most often, you'll find overly complicated, failure-prone designs that are worse than their simpler domestic counterparts. This isn't just in such things as emission control, but even in what you thought were solved mechanical problems generations ago: hood releases and power windows.
I'm not shocked that their software sucks as well. Then again, other cars aren't exactly paragons of software engineering either. Nothing exemplifies that better than the shitshow that is built-in Bluetooth and "infotainment" systems.
I'd much prefer a nice, solidly built low tech car, rather than an iPhone with wheels.
How can you really create deep organizational change without a strong top down leader that understands what needs to get done?
1. We’re now introducing so many brand new problems to automobiles or tremendously exacerbating existing ones. I’m referring to problems inherent to all complex software. Bugs, updates causing various regressions, fragility, a whole new set of attack vectors for hackers, [insert 1000 other problems here].
2. Consumers are unable to appreciate craftsmanship and engineering prowess of creating physical interfaces (dials, buttons, materials, textures, precise stitching and assembly). People love and definitely pay for craftsmanship in things like mechanical keyboards and mechanical watches. We used to be able to enjoy this in cars too, but that’s rapidly fading.
3. It’s just so distracting and time consuming (and therefore dangerous) using a touch screen. Touch screens only make sense on devices that you’re expected to focus your eyes on. That’s why they work on phones but not to replace physical keys of a keyboard, for example.
The Polestar 2 felt like someone with a lot of intent and diligence sat down in the cockpit of the vehicle and asked some flavor of, "Should this feels like a traditional car or should this feel like new technology?" about every single little thing.
The UX of the car is Swedish "functionalism" at its finest. We drove a VW, a Tesla, a BMW, a Hyundai, a Kia, a Porsche, a Ford, and a Chevrolet too. For both my spouse and I it wasn't even a close race. We ordered the Polestar. We took delivery of it a couple weeks ago, and even though the $7,500 tax credit expired after the recent legislation passed in the US, I would gladly pay $7,500 more for it than its competitors.
The drive feel and the cabin UX are the parts of any car that you're constantly interacting with. To me those two factors outweighed pretty much everything else.
VW is getting a lot of criticism. Yet, if you try to order one now, you might be waiting until well into next year. They are selling pretty well despite the software issues. They have invested a lot in production capacity and they are on track to match Tesla in production volume in a few years. Few other manufacturers can say that. And most of those are based in China.
I don’t see EV sales as relevant here. It doesn’t prove that people are lining up to buy them because of touch screens. There’s a wide variety of reasons to account for sales numbers and for wait lists: great EV cash rebates, high gas prices, the awesome feeling of instant acceleration, supply chain problems with batteries and chips causing multi year wait lists, etc.
People can also get used to lots of surprising changes, even if they’re for the worse, as I’m arguing. If TV manufacturers all started replacing tv remote buttons for touch screens, I’m sure we would eventually get used to it despite it being annoying at first. Likewise, I’ve been forced to get used to the touch screen in my car.
Are they? Because that's not what the actual numbers tell me. But that is what they are claiming. And its what GM claims as well (with far less credibility of course). Its just the trendy thing to say.
The underlying assumption is that Tesla will slow down, but that hasn't been happening.
VW thanks to Diselgate is in a good position with EV, to be sure.
My points 1 and 2 above still stand. A screen that can control everything means you have complex underlying software and all the problems that come with that. There’s another commenter here talking about a stack overflow bug from a software update in Porsche Taycans that caused the whole engine to shut down. I keep reading about serious bugs like this. I believe there was a Tesla bug that caused the entire screen to go black and become nonfunctional. I just can’t believe it’s 2022 and we’ve regressed to having to reboot our cars.
Instead of looking at the road.
Well, it’s all about Youtube clicks now. Who shows more new cars faster. Being honest and critical does not help those individuals because that will cause that they’ll stop receiving cars for reviews.
You see. Today to review a car, you have to get s special press car. Can’t pick up a random rental and do a review for it.
It is the balance I like. I don't own one (yet).
Their structural safety is great.
The best appears to be the 2021 Dacia Logan[1] which has a crash test littered with "marginals":
> [...] structures in the dashboard presented a risk of injury to occupants of different sizes and to those sitting in different positions, and protection for this part of the body was downgraded to marginal. Chest protection was also rated as marginal for both front seat occupants, based on dummy readings of chest compression.
> In the side barrier test, representing an impact by another vehicle, chest compression indicated a marginal level of protection.
> ...geometric analysis of the rear seats indicated marginal whiplash protection.
I think Dacia makes great cars for what they are and their price, but there are much better options for crash mitigation.
Dacia makes cheap cars. They're okay but they drive like a cart, the chairs are crappy and the clutch pedal is quite annoying in how it feels.
The only Dacia stuff I'm personally interested in is the stuff with the new Renault hybrid drivetrains
The Captur hybrid is the only Renault PHEV I'm aware of and it has automatic transmission.
Dacia did not release horsepower figures or a sales price for the hybrid version, but the drivetrain produces 140 hp in the Clio. Dacia said it will be “the most affordable seven-seater hybrid on the market.”
Renault says the E-Tech system allows for 80 percent of urban driving in electric-only mode, and for a total fuel savings of 40 percent compared with a comparable gasoline drivetrain.
The "same" model is car is vastly improved in terms of safety in this past decade over anything prior. Look at the results.
There’s dozens of us! Dozens!
The present situation exists due to increased monetization, not because people are clamoring for blue-sceens, dangerous distractions, broken bluetooth, and pervasive surveillance in cars.
"Hey wouldn't it be great if my disgruntled ex could find out where I am every minute!?"
Very badly made unfinished and not thought throw implementations are shipped while the content is artificially inflated pumping too much and too complex into, and sometimes - when the ideology of the organization sets it on flags as strategy - simplified on the surface (UI) to the level destroying essential functionality. Squeezing unnecessarily amount of functionality into "clean and streamline" interface not adequate to handle that complexity while accepting the culture of unfinished/incomplete products: advertising the product update - which many times ruin not improves - as good thing and not in its place: the praising of an unfinished product.
Software that is supposed to make life easier making life harder and ruining previously good concepts (e.g. substandard touch screen instead of buttons). Instead of just doing something easy smoothly the user increasingly have to tinker and tune the product (configure, setup) long to bring it to the minimum level of functionality making it a very high maintenance thing (also bringing in risks and security concerns unheard of before).
It is a daily struggle that badly designed and executed software ruins the experience. The internet is full with workarounds for products, there are sites making living on that.
Looking for household appliances like vacuum, dishwasher, fridge now is more difficult because of novelty but unnecessary software supported features sweep into the picture making the search and usage more difficult than necessary (but basically just avoiding those having faulty software) and the product unreliable. Forcing software everywhere is making things worse. Not to mention the rushed and poor quality, intentionally incomplete release of software that escalates the troubles even more.
Software is not the holy grail, far from it! It is just a tool to be used in the proper setting, in the proper level or amount, and should be made properly for that.
How can any product with 10K developers on it NOT collapse under its own weight?
Germany with closed nuclear power plants, lack of cheap gas, lack of fertilizers for agriculture, and stopped chemical industry, will never be considered as a strong economy. The future will be dominated by Chinese manufacturers.
And transition to "green energy" will result in coal burning, cold winters and service economy. You will own nothing. You will rent everything. Owning a new vehicle will be for privileged ones.
That everybody has an ICE backup is just not true whatever your personal opinion is.
It's fun to watch how many years people will post this former "fact" for!