Cars
published in December 27, 2020 |
Per Invited Contributor
December 27, 2020 in Invited Contributor
Originally published in EV Annex.
in Charles Morris
While researching my book, Tesla: How Elon Musk and Company made electric cars legal and remade the automotive and energy sectorsI was lucky to be able to interview two of Tesla’s founders, Marc Tarpenning and Ian Wright. Wright offered some insights into Tesla’s systems approach to its software, which was the opposite of the way old car manufacturers were (and most are still) doing things, and it ended up being one of my favorite parts of the book. .
He made these comments in 2014 and was referring to events that happened years before, but what he said is still largely true today, and since then many writers have echoed Wright’s observation that Tesla’s systems approach is a of its greatest competitive advantages. I gained a lot from that interview – I referred to it in at least a dozen articles.
 Inside the Tesla Model S centered on technology (Source: Tesla) |
When Tesla created the Model S, it changed the way cars were developed and manufactured, although not in ways that were obvious at the time. “The way Toyota makes a car, the way they stamp metal, weld and paint them and make all the internal parts and assemble the car, is kind of hard to overcome. I’m not sure if Tesla made any headway on this, or even reached the level of doing that, ”Ian Wright told me (in 2014). “On the other hand, if you are a technology engineer in Silicon Valley and look at the way modern cars are designed electronically, to use an Australian expression, it looks like a dog’s breakfast. They don’t seem to have what we would call systems architecture. “
People often describe the modern automobile as a “computer on wheels”, but it is actually more like a dozen small computers, not one. Unlike a modern computer network or software application, a car (not Tesla) is not designed as a single system – it is a mix of incompatible and separate computer systems, each from a different vendor. “I’m looking out the window at my Volkswagen Touareg 2008, and I bet it has sixty or seventy electronic black boxes, three hundred pounds of wiring harness and software from twenty different companies,” said Ian Wright. “The biggest problem with the reliability of these cars is electronics and software. I think Tesla took a real perspective on Silicon Valley systems architecture when designing all of the Model S’s electronic components. I don’t know how far this way of doing things will translate to the big ones, but I think it’s a very different way of do that and I hope their electronics and software end up being a little more reliable than what we’re used to in cars. ”
All software running Model S is integrated as a single, logical system, which means, according to Wright, “less black boxes, a simpler wiring harness, more integrated software, less surprises when something goes wrong and more things don’t work properly, or something strange starts to happen. ”
Wright offered a practical example of how the mixed approach can result in a bad customer experience. “My Volkswagen 2008 has a nice color LCD right in the middle of the instrument panel and it drives me crazy, because there is a lot of space to have a lot of information on it, but they divided it into a lot of large fields. One of the fields provides the temperature of the outside air – until the low fuel warning goes out. When the low fuel warning goes off, they overwrite the temperature with the low fuel warning icon and, until you add more fuel to the car, it will no longer be possible to tell what the outside air temperature is. They could have easily moved things around and put them elsewhere, but they couldn’t do that because, as they developed things, there was a specific team that did this, a specific piece of code – it’s done that way. That’s the kind of thing Tesla does in its sleep, and the big guys really struggle with. “
The integrated approach also means that as technology improves, things can be updated quickly and seamlessly. In the traditional auto industry, improvements are usually made only each year on the new model. A smartphone manufacturer, on the other hand, can launch an update, or even a major new feature, in a matter of weeks. As we have seen, Tesla has made several important updates to its vehicles remotely, without the owners having to do anything. Making similar changes to a traditional vehicle would require bringing it back to the dealership. As far as I know, no other automaker has ever released an improvement or upgrade to an existing vehicle, except to repair a defective component.
In an EV, electronics and software are the heart of the vehicle, so as the principals start producing EVs, they will eventually be forced to take a more system-oriented approach (although this is not likely to happen, as long as that they are simply adapting models powered by gas, putting an electric power train). In addition, two other powerful trends are converging with electrification: automation and connectivity. Keeping up with these advances will absolutely require a software-centric approach. This is not a minor adjustment for automakers – it is a revolution in the way they design and build their products. Building the electrified, autonomous and hyperconnected automobile of the 21st century using the current system would be like building a smartphone that incorporates a chip and operating system for telephony, another for the internet, another for the camera, another for the music player, etc. .
It is not just a matter of doing a better job designing electronics and software – the problems are inherent in the structure of the industry. As Wright explained to me, although the big guys are improving their software systems, “they usually don’t develop any of this themselves, they write a specification and send it to Tier 1 suppliers like TRW, Siemens and Bosch [or, in the case of the Chevy Bolt, LG Chem]. If they’re still doing that, I think they’ll still have a problem. “
You just read an excerpt from Chapter 9 of Tesla: How Elon Musk and Company made electric cars legal and remade the automotive and energy sectors. The rest of the chapter discusses Tesla’s battery innovations, the origin of the Supercharger network, Tesla’s security features, autopilot and more. The next chapter explains how Tesla redefined not only the car, but the automaker.
The book has been completely revised and expanded, with the addition of new chapters on China, Model Y, Cybertruck and the events of 2020. It is now available on Amazon.
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