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Comment by throwaway728274 | Hacker News Reader

For a variety of performance car nerd related reasons, I’ve not paid too much attention to Tesla. But iirc, there have been a couple threads here and elsewhere about Tesla making “expedient” choices in Eng, with a lot of horrible bodges around critical components. It definitely left me with an impression that Tesla was a place with low engineering quality — though again, I have no source at hand here, and don’t feel bothered to do the searching.

Anyone know the articles / blog posts I’m talking about?

FWIW, I don’t think the idea of Elon having his own folks do some internal reviews egregious. Id bet the comm and positioning around it was suboptimal though, atleast given Elon’s personality.

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>Tesla was a place with low engineering quality

SpaceX has had a somewhat similar reputation (at least early, it may have changed for the better).

For example, they had a spectacular failure related to bad material quality in a strut.[1] It's common practice in aerospace quality to have "coupons" kept, tested, and traceable for these types of critical components. Apparently, SpaceX wasn't follow this procedure and they changed their policies after the mishap to do so. There have been some other deviations from standard practices that may lead one to raise an eyebrow.

I've sometimes wondered if these are examples of an attitude of "move fast and break things" creeping into other (generally more conservative) safety critical domains.

[1]

Interesting. My impression is that SpaceX has delivered some extraordinary results by throwing out a lot of conventional wisdom and starting over from first principles. This anecdote suggests they’re humble enough to re-adopt standard practices when experience shows their value.

Seems like a good approach… if the cost of failure is manageable.

What, in that example, do you think is the first principle they were working from?

It seems to me that they were missing the principle of quality of “trust but verify.”

This is a risk to SpaceX that I don’t think gets talked about much. They are able to take risks and throw out conventional wisdom to streamline, but sometimes it’s easy to conflate being lucky with being good. But each time their luck goes bad, they lose a little bit of that edge by having to layer on bureaucratic process (like additional quality checks) to mitigate that previously unrecognized risk. Do that enough times and you start to look just like the dinosaurs they’re replacing. If the lose a human life, it may come even faster.

I know of this Twitter thread, but not sure of the authenticity.

https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376

I don't know if it's authentic either, but this bit from the thread sure is interesting:

> autopilot had _really_ high turnover at one point before release because some guy from space x came in and gave the entire dept a C pointer/memory test because Elon said they were "late" to ship.

https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939642243309569/...

And yet their software is 100x better from a features aspect than other auto companies, has been for 10 years, and as new VW EVs show, still is.

Some of the described pearl-clutching issues are garden variety big enterprise data management stories.

Take a random sample of Tesla vehicles, more than four but fewer than 10, and the panel gaps are obscene for the vehicle price and mystique- it’s clear proof they have low standards.

Tesla Model S owner here. The software on iOS and car is several years ahead of the competition. It embarrasses luxury German automakers. It’s made with the user in mind, it is elegant, and it is innovative in many surprising ways.

For balance, there have been bugs - the linking of key fobs to driver profiles has always been glitchy, and Tesla’s decision to use an inadequate eMMC chip was shortsighted given the volume of data logging. This caused issues for a few owners when the chips started to degrade over time. But to Tesla’s credit they later offered a free chip upgrade to all owners, and even covered the costs of those (like me) who got a third party replacement.

I rate Tesla’s software engineering. I’ve had years of issue-free OTA updates and sheer pleasure from driving the car. And having access to the car via an API is cool too :-)

I also own a Tesla and I'd rate their user facing software at a C+ at best. It's better than the competition, sure, but the competition is legacy auto manufacturers with no tradition of expertise in software.

Examples: the mobile app is very clunky and slow, the in-car dashboard devotes half of it's real estate to a visualization of the car's object detection, serving no purpose other than to distract the driver.

It's fine. But the problem domain of Twitter is dramatically different than anything Tesla engineers are working on.

Not a Tesla owner. I sat in a demo Tesla. Infotainment UI looked clumsy. There was no Apple CarPlay. The most basic things didn't have knobs and required touch screen to use. Usability was years behind everyone else.

This was my impression as well (although I just sat on the passenger seat for 150km).

The cockpit is all nice and shiny, but not having any haptic feedback for any kind of regular controls you'd use (switching media, A/C control, etc) is a very questionable choice and a worrying trend among automakers in General. The center screen in the Model 3 to get something as basic as your current traveling speed seems equally questionable from a safety perspective.

I've also seen my fair share of Tesla summon close calls on the neighboring parking lot.

When it comes to the app, Tesla owners seem to have a broad spectrum of opinions. Personally for a car as expensive as a Tesla, the quality of the app would be the last thing I'd care about as I would consider it absolutely unnecessary.

The main thing where I totally agree Tesla is absolutely ahead are OTA updates for car firmware. However, looking at it from a security standpoint, bad security practices could really backfire and from a privacy point of view I'm not a fan of permanently internet connected vehicles either.

I drive a Mercedes and Apple CarPlay works fantastic (Tesla’s driving OS would probably be a sidegrade at best). And I get all the fit and finish of a Mercedes instead of Tesla..

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