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Comment by practicemaths | Hacker News Reader

In a time when cars are increasingly more connected than ever. More sensors and controls. Literally more software in cars today than ever before and they do this?

I suspect this a poor move on GM's part.

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Par for the course. Have you driven a modern GM vehicle? Full of issues and borderline worthless once the warranty is up.

Really great company that the tax payer was forced to rescue.

The remaining legacy, domestic auto manufacturers are just kind of circling the drain. They all have stupid problems and largely seem to have ridden the coat tails of an older generation that vowed to buy American.

Anecdotally, but my Ford F-150 has so many software bugs it’s insane. It’s mechanically reliable, but the software is terrible.

* backup sensor don’t work about 10% of the time

* backup camera won’t engage about 1% of the time

* main screen will boot loop a few times before it fully turns on about 5% of the time

* heated and cooled seats seem to choose random setting when the car is remote started.

* lane centering system will crash if you try to take it through a turn that’s too tight. Have to turn the vehicle off, open the door to fix it.

* my trailer system won’t remember custom made trailers. I don’t really have a use for the system, but annoying none the less.

* auto power folding mirrors often get confused about their state when shutting down or starting the car up. Annoying, but easily fixed.

* my digital instrument panel will occasionally not turn on

* my digital instrument panel will occasional forget all of my custom settings. Different problem than above.

* Not really a bug, but the car has soooooooooo many popup notifications. There will literally be status messages that are overlaid by an almost identical, but different message. Thank you, F-150, I know that I plugged my cooler into the outlet in the bed. Please stop asking me if I want the generator on. The car is running, I want the generator on.

The physical vehicle is rock solid and I’m extremely happy with that. However, I just want to rip out all of the electronics and replace them with the magic that Kia/Hyundai built in their vehicle.

I largely get this impression anytime I step into an American vehicle. It feels like it was designed by a committee of out of touch executives.

If bugs weren’t so prevalent I’d think a squirrel’s been eating your wires haha. That’s a lot. My Honda has a few but I’m happy with it although I think someday it might kill me with these phantom lane corrections.

It’s a 3 year old vehicle. The backup sensor might be a wiring issue, but everything else is pure software issue.

Many of the “won’t turn on” things actually involve the component powering on (like the backlight turns on), but the digital components just don’t work.

Funny, my Chevrolet has most of the same issues and it drives me mad. The most infuriating one is where the infotainment comes on but is unresponsive to all input. You're stuck if you left the radio too loud or on a station you don't like.

One difference is it's also not mechanically too sound, to boot. The rear end needed a complete rebuild at 9k miles. Yes, nine thousand.

GM repaid all the debt given during the rescue, please don’t conflate a bail out with the companies poor decisions.

Not per Wikipedia[1]:"Through the Troubled Asset Relief Program the US Treasury invested a total $51 billion into the GM bankruptcy. Until December 10, 2013, the U. S. Treasury recovered $39 billion from selling its GM stake. The final direct cost to the Treasury of the GM bailout was $11-12 billion ($10.5 billion for General Motors and $1.5 billion for former GM financing GMAC, now known as Ally)."

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reor...

Did you miss the next sentence?

> A study by the Center for Automotive Research found that the GM bailout saved 1.2 million jobs and preserved $34.9 billion in tax revenue.

The whole point was to avoid the economic fallout of a GM collapse (and with it, yet another bank for the FDIC to deal with).

An automotive special interest group concluded that a $10.5B bailout for the automotive sector was a good thing!

I went and checked their funding, and only a quarter of it is from corporate interests. Governments actually fund them more.

As if those 1.2 million people would have just been twiddling their thumbs.

Why do you think it’s called “The Great Recession”?

Because a business cycle contraction occurred? If GM had been allowed to fail, other companies would have filled the gap in the market, and new businesses would have emerged, most likely generating even greater tax revenue over time. While there may have been some short-term thumb twiddling, the market would have eventually created new jobs elsewhere, jobs that would have been even more productive. There's a great opportunity cost to "saving" millions of unproductive jobs.

> Because a business cycle contraction occurred?

Yeah, like in 1929.

> If GM had been allowed to fail, other companies would have filled the gap

Which ones? A failure of GM would have hit Ford as well, because they share a lot of suppliers.

Not true at all; both the bondholders, who under the law were supposed to be senior, got screwed over, and certain non-union salaried employee pensions, were severely cut out of pension money by the PBGC.

If they had been making good decisions they would not have needed the bailout.

Nonsense. The government took a $10.5B loss when it converted the loan to equity. At one point the government owned 61% of GM. Wild.

The sensors and controls are made by companies like Bosch. GM doesn't need any expertise in this stuff, they just buy parts from companies that have it.

Not true. A few exceptional vendors like Bosch excepted, manufacturers are increasingly in-sourcing development away from the tier suppliers. It's a lot of work managing them to get quality outcomes and that system has repeatedly bitten manufacturers hard in the past decade. It also lengthens development timelines significantly and raises the cost of mid-development changes, when they actually need faster, more responsive development practices.

The issue with companies like GM is that while most people recognize what I've just said internally, there's a lot of conflict between traditional management processes/styles/cultures and the changes they need to make to adapt. These kinds of layoffs tend to result from the financial fragility they've built up. When some minor event puts clouds on the financial horizon, management only understands one tool to make changes and that's layoffs/pay cuts.

Have you ever written integration software?

Cutting 1000 software engineers doesn't necessarily mean they won't be needing the services of 1000 software engineers. They could just be moving to contract out the work instead of having more in-house staff.

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