These companies have huge wallets, and can surely scoop up a smaller automative microcontroller company and bring it in-house? It seems like a problem than enough money could solve quickly, but they've been doing horribly at this for decades now.
So they've just chosen death. Fantastic, great to hear.
I'm tired. Been out in the sun all day. Explain this to me please.
When I do the math I get 500000 * $0.05 = $25000
That's a small drop in a large bucket of their gross income or net profits.
EDIT: Harsh sun must've burned a few of my processors. I see now that this would only be one small change that saved an inconsequential amount of money. But each group is incentivized to produce minor changes like this that save small amounts and that those amounts do add to substantial savings and help complete the process of enshittification of the ownership and driving experience for those who choose to buy one of these vehicles.
"We found $X cost savings" is the easiest path the promotion. It's measurable, cleanly attributable, and immediate, while the downsides are not. Maybe perform is bad bc they skimped on memory, or maybe it's because the software team sucks. Maybe it means future updates are hamstrung, but who cares the bonus checks cleared years ago. Besides, you probably got promoted to a bigger / better role by now, and who can remember who decided what when?
Now you get a shitty feature for savings while the people who implemented it can go cry in a corner thinking about their good version.
I have never worked in the auto industry, but I was an embedded software engineer at an F500 company that loved to just throw hardware "over the wall" to the SW engineers.
I had come from a very small company and working like this made no sense to me. After a particularly annoying discovery I was talking to one of the EE's and he explained it to me. "You see, the guy who designed that controller knows nothing about software. He just has a list of specs to meet, and he gets a processor, wires a bunch of peripherals to it, and releases a circuit board. If you're lucky, the SW guy who sat in the design reviews made sure to get a good enough processor to make your job easier. If not, you're SOL because as long as the hardware meets all the requirements they gave him, no one is going to want to change anything."
In this case, the engineer was incentivized to save a whopping $0.50 on a machine that cost around $2,000 to build. And for lack of that $.50 part, software spent hundreds of hours adding code to find a way to implement the behavior that it would have provided. Not to mention all the Test hours needed to verify that it worked as expected.
Paradoxically, I also saw the opposite behavior on the same project: people adding extremely complex hardware to solve simple problems because the company paid very well for patents, so of course everyone had an incentive to produce patentable designs.
Spent 7 years at the three pointed star within design and UX - one day, when i’m over all i had to witness and experience i’ll write a book about the downfall of the german automotive industry.
It’s all politics and due to constant battles and changing ownership throughout departments they won’t ever have a solid foundation. And i dare to assume that this goes for most of the automotive industry.
It’s sad to see that a once driving force of innovation is stumbling over its own arrogance and ignorance.
A major factor contributing to this are cost saving measures from the early 2000s where most of them stopped in-house research and development giving most of the work to contractors - a very expensive cost saving measure long term.
We’re down to them using “technology” as a seasoning for consumption like a fancy restaurant - very little long term thinking.
In German cities with automotive industry, you’ll find thousands of these satellite companies.
I hear that kind of statements all the time but if you take like real important car things germans are (still) pretty good: their cars handle really well, powertraian usually works perfectly smooth (or sporty), ergonomics is good to perfect, it will not rust for decades, list goes on ... The real things killing germans I think: cars are expensive and unreliable
For example
Since cars are primarily being bought by sculptural aesthetics of the exterior and above all their brand they continue being bought for those who feel the need of a status symbol.
At the core there is still a lack of a long term strategy and above all stability to build on - not saying it is an easy task.
In the end the customer has to suffer with abysmal usability, reliability and ever changing mental models. And don’t get me started about the touchscreens everywhere situation…
It isn’t just software though - VW moving development and above all production engineering and planning to china since they failed coming up with an efficient solution in Wolfsburg is basically saying it all. [1]
Dire times ahead and i hope for the best.
A good design from engineering standpoint. You feel it just instantly when you use the product. Interior is nice and will accommodate just about every possible driver comfortably with every control reachable. Suspension just works frkn great no matter how it was tuned (sporty or comfortable) and no matter how simple the design is. Same for drivetrain, you will acelerate/decelerate precisely how much you'd expect. And it's not a luxury it's a norm, even cheapest german or french cars have all this things sorted out. I'm speaking for the EU market though)
This is not sexy. This is important.
Needs different mindsets than the software folks grew up along in the past decades. Yes! Yes! There are much much more sexy topics to focus on for an agile software maker, that yields better looking results seemingly instantly. Compared to the boring finalization and coordination - oh, you devil bastard, coordination - heavy activities.
Don't take me seriously, speculating heavily.
Everyone has spent a mountain of money on this problem but spent it all assiduously avoiding addressing the root causes.
Car companies realized early on they could outsource component development and production to 3rd parties and they could make them bid each other to further lower the prices.
So their platforms were optimized to be able to swap component vendors very easily (to achieve lowest costs).
Of course the vendors are not 100% interchangeable and building a platform to accommodate everyone has to make sacrifices.Aka target the least common denominator across all vendors.
So maybe the legacy guys were right all along?
And to what extent were the subsidies an advantage? They phased out after 200,000 units and Tesla has sold millions.
Since government wants to encourage transition to sustainable energy, and oil and gas have been subsidized for decades, not to mention the tens of billions in bailouts for legacy auto, putting things in perspective shows that legacy auto should get the brunt of any criticism here, and the relatively smaller subsidies to Tesla are offsetting the larger investment Tesla has made.
The beauty of it is that the money is actually paid to Tesla by the legacy auto makers who have not stepped up or have stepped up only at a scale of virtue signaling, if you look at the sales numbers.
I know, I know, shooting the messenger…
Each car has dozens to 100+ ecus, written in different languages, by different teams, different requirements, and different companies. Some are proprietary. Ford can’t just tell Bosch, hey your abs module needs to now integrate with our api, multiplied by 100+ companies. The legacy car makers need to revisit everything, and move most of it in-house.
With that kind of adversarial relationship, you are never getting anything above the barest minimum of competence.
You ask: Why BMW doesn't just buy the ECU manufacturer?
Well... the company that was selling the ECU to BMW, is BIGGER than BMW. Even if BMW sold 100% of its assets and stock, it wouldn't have enough money to buy the ECU manufacturer.
I think in a lot of cases that would be Bosch, which is huge.
Worse this really grew into a culture of entitlement where only a ready to use product is acceptable. There is no R&D anymore, there are people looking to buy solutions that don't exist for car makers.