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Comment by konschubert | Hacker News Reader

It’s fascinating to see how the legacy automakers are completely failing at this.

Money can’t buy culture.

I don’t think Ford, Volvo, Porsche, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes, even VW are “completely” failing. Stellantis, Mazda, and Subaru, yes. Toyota, yes and no — they didn’t really try with the BZ4X, but their plug-in hybrids sell as fast as they claim they can make them.

Ford just cut Lightning production (in half? A third? Something like that). Nissan stopped making the Leaf. Tesla is still increasing. You can't get ahead by decreasing production.

Curious what you mean that Mazda is failing

I have high hopes for Mazda to produce lightweight EVs that actually feel good to drive, but right now they just have (had) the MX-30, and that was by all accounts the worst EV on the market. They have a lot of work to do.

Are they throwing money at it? Or, more to the point, why do legacy automakers have such a hard time shipping polished software?

Volkswagen recently built a software org up to 6000 people (Cariad) and recently announced they are laying of 2000 of them. If they were structured anything like German suppliers I've dealt with, there was probably a 12 person team in charge of opening curly braces, 15 in charge of closing curly braces, but only a 5 person team responsible for semicolons so the timeline for each line of code was about 2 years. Great reliability though once it's done.

Cariad also had the CEO, CTO and CFO fired half a year ago. It's pretty impressive.

There are also rumors of Porsche and Audi being royally pissed off at Volkswagen for that garbage, and at least Porsche is ditching it for Android Auto.

I'm not sure that the german automakers are known for reliability :)

They are, and they have the emissions tests to prove it.

I'm a Lexus/Toyota stan but a lot of what makes a german car unrealiable is deferred maintenance. Lexus and Toyota build cars so you can treat them like shit and they'll still run and Germans build cars that are meant to be maintained then they will run well.

They're really two different approaches to car design. Why they do it this way really comes down to national culture.

The Japanese aren't likely to keep up with maintenance successfully? I've only been there a few times, but I didn't get that sense whatsoever. Pretty much nothing I encountered seemed materially neglected.

Schedules dictated by marketing and dealership deliveries.

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