More Apple Car Thoughts: Software Culture

http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/11/01/more-apple-car-thoughts-software-culture/

by subnaught • 11 years ago

58 77 11 years ago

Lutz also recently said he thinks Tesla is in huge trouble and that (I'm going to paraphrase here) "we tried running our own retail locations at bmw and they are much too expensive so they need to get rid of them asap".

He had an excellent run in the motor industry, but now he seems to be sadly outdated on what is happening. So I think we should all be happy to take the opposite side of his position. Which is that huge wrenching changes are coming. And not from the incumbents.

paul2• 11 years ago

I love the quote from Ed Colligan:

Messrs. Zetsche and Lutz might want to meditate on Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s infelicitous words mocking the newborn iPhone in 2006 [emphasis mine]: “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

blub3• 11 years ago

Mythicizing the iPhone is both dishonest and unhelpful. They didn't just figure it out and walk in, it took them years and many iterations to build a world class product.

Apple was able to use the wedge of UX to convince customers to but their devices and gave them time to fix the gaps in their hardware and software.

jarek7• 11 years ago

Also note that Apple wasn't just "PC guys" at the time of iPhone introduction, they had fairly high-profile experience building portable devices through the iPods.

Google first bought a software team and then partnered with HTC to get hardware for the first Android phone on the market - again it wasn't a pure "PC guys" "just figuring it out."

But the Colligan quote is well on its way to becoming historic out of context, like Olsen's and Gates's.

paul2• 11 years ago

How is quoting the Palm CEO dishonest? The fact that he was so wrong about Apple is kind of the point.

tormeh• 11 years ago

Good point, but I think they already have the culture necessary in whatever group is responsible for their CPU design. That's a low-fault tolerance environment, too.

The advantage of the incumbents is that cars, as long as they have to be driven manually, are not entertainment machines and cannot really be entertainment machines. Passengers already have their own phones etc.

I think Tesla's on to something, but it's not software. I don't think it will necessarily transfer well to Apple.

venomsnake6• 11 years ago

Apple's software culture is not suitable for cars. You need real time, reliable, simple and rock hard.

Do you really want the company that created iTunes for windows to drive your car?

bluthru3• 11 years ago

Do you want one of the PayPal developers to drive your car?

cromwellian• 11 years ago

Do you want the guy who launches rockets that travel amazing distances to dock with a space station to make your car?

PayPal was a merger of two companies BTW.

Judging by the work Google put into WebKit before the fork, Apple didn't even have a rigorous testing coverage, fuzzing, etc IIRC.

I wouldn't even trust Google to do the kind of stuff automakers and defense contractors do with respect to verification and testing. Someone else was right, this could only come from their hardware groups like PA Semi and not from the guys who write the apps or OS front end.

Animats• 11 years ago

Note the author: Jean-Louis Gassée. He's forgotten now, but he was head of product development at Apple after Jobs was fired. He left Apple in 1990, not having done much of note. He started Be (an early multiprocessor 680x0 desktop machine with its own OS), but that failed. Since then, he's mostly been a pundit.

alayne• 11 years ago

I think you're being a little hard on Gassée. He held numerous high level positions at technology companies and worked on the Newton, BeOS, and other technology which while not market successes, were still influential. At one time BeOS was considered a contender as a replacement for MacOS.

draw_down• 11 years ago

I'm not sure what your point is, he's been writing this blog for years and it's quite good in my opinion.

jarek7• 11 years ago

Read back in the Monday Note archives and you will see he's quite the fan of most Apple things

pavlov• 11 years ago

Not that it matters, but BeOS never ran on 680x0.

crb002• 11 years ago

It's the Clang IR, same stuff they are making you push to the app store. Realtime software updates passed as proof carrying byte code. That's where Apple will be king, the agility to safely update.

rb2k_3• 11 years ago

Maybe only partially related, but one of the things that surprised me the most when moving to the US from Germany, was seeing the large Mercedes star on one of the buildings while driving through Sunnyvale [0].

A few days later, I found myself at a BBQ filled with other fellow German ex-pats and basically all of them were working for Mercedes [1], VW, Bosch [3] ... As it turns out, all of the big German car companies are conducting research out here.

It seems like a lot of the interesting UI and Autonomous Vehicle research is being done out here. From what I gather, they seem to think that the mechanical engineering going into these cars can be done in Germany at a level that they are happy with, but anything to do with the UI/UX and Software that controls the vehicle would be a better fit over here.

I am originally from Stuttgart, which is where Bosch, Porsche and Mercedes were founded and have their headquarters and I tend to agree. Germany is a great place to optimize an existing technology or come up with interesting mechanical changes, but dealing with something as fluent and user-centric like on-screen interfaces or the Software running e.g. the Navigation, doesn't particularly play to the slow moving German company mindset. I think that as long as there's a problem that can be measured exactly (torque, gas milage, ability to withstand mechanical pressure, ...) a German company will do a great job. For the "softer" qualities, I can see a good symbiosis with the culture out here in the valley.

That being said, meeting all of these people and seeing the companies within a 20 minute drive was an entertaining turn of events.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3866231,-122.0357596,3a,15y,...

[1] http://www.mbrdna.com/

[2] http://www.vwerl.com/

[3] http://www.bosch.us/content/language1/html/rtc.htm

dognotdog• 11 years ago

All big players in the car industry have a research center in SV nowadays, it seems, not only the Germans. There is undoubtedly a lot of talent in the Bay Area, yet the rush of the car industry to SV smells of cargo culting.

blumentopf• 11 years ago

Based on my experience (from working there), car manufacturers often do not implement stuff themselves, they outsource. E.g. the HTML5-based infotainmemt system in the Porsche 918 was not created by Porsche (though they market it as if it was), but by S1nn.

From a software engineer perspective, if you work at a car manufacturer, you usually do not write software yourself, you're hired to write specs for external companies and verify that the results are conformant. Which honestly is boring.

The car manufacturers should react to the influx of new competitors (like Apple, Google) by becoming software companies themselves, but management is too stupid to see that. S1nn is a perfect example: Apple or Google would have bought the company right away, so should have Porsche. Guess who bought them instead? Harman.

rb2k_3• 11 years ago

you're hired to write specs for external companies and verify that the results are conferment

Sounds like a hilarious game of chinese whispers / telephone. :)

derwildemomo• 11 years ago

Haven't we like talked about this 3 hours ago ;)?

rb2k_3• 11 years ago

I steal the content of all of our conversations to gather more internet points.

roel_v• 11 years ago

Miele is another example of this.

Rezo3• 11 years ago

The software folks (Google, Apple) are going to figure out how to build great cars much faster than the car folks are going to learn how to build great software.

Car companies are incentivized through their engineering know-how, massive supply chains and complex dealership relations to keep optimizing complex gas engines that require significant maintenance. The software folks, having no burden of legacy on the other hand are incentivized to make the engine and car platform as simple as possible, basically an electric motor (or 2, or 4...) with virtually no serviceable parts. The cost and profit structures of the two sides will look very different, and that is going to make the customer experience much better on the "innovative" side (no more haggling the price of a car for example, 1st party servicing, etc).

Forget the Palm quote. Look at Nokia in 2007, when the iPhone was introduced: 50%+ marketshare, 100,000+ employees, 100 million+ devices/year, they already had "advanced" features like app stores and web browsers. But they were fundamentally a hardware company and supply chain oriented, optimizing the bill of materials and crippling their products to death, and could not make the transition. Not even 10 years later, they are extinct! That is what BMW and friends should be worried about.

venomsnake6• 11 years ago

Just image how fun would have been the Apple Maps rollout if it was deployed on cars. With the software glitches that has plagued smartphones in the last decade - we would have had a small genocide on our hands if it was translated on fast chunks of metal, able to kill couple of people on collision.

A single messed OTA (or heaven forbid maliciously corrupted) could inflict some serious pain.

Retra• 11 years ago

If Apple Maps was mission-critical industrial-strength navigation software (as you'd have to assume in this hypothetical) then maybe Apple would have put more money and effort into making it work well.

Why would you assume the software they wrote for a smart-phone would be the same software they'd write for a car?

Rezo3• 11 years ago

Cars are still regulated and will have to pass safety and compliance tests. I think the companies themselves also realize that they're going to have be extremely careful with updates, not the least from a liability point of view. But, where there's a will, there'a way, and mainstream OTA car updates are entirely inevitable in my opinion.

But the traditional car manufacturers do no have this will. It does not fit their world view. The idea of an OTA that changes the car is abhorrent to them. They looked at bemusement when Tesla did UI feature updates OTA, confusion/doubt when Tesla changed driving dynamics OTA last year, and horrification at the "self driving" features recently deployed. And they have no plans in this regard either, they are entirely convinced they are right and the rest of the world is going mad and will surely self-correct. The luxury 2015 model German sedan you buy today will NEVER receive a new feature, or even bugfixes except at a dealer, while Google and Apple are all about creating new platforms spanning multiple products & years. And that is why the Germans will lose.

bluthru3• 11 years ago

Tesla doesn't have the software resources of Apple and they're making it work.

jarek7• 11 years ago

incentivized to make the engine and car platform as simple as possible

The question at core of the post is: how simple is possible?

When iPhone launched it didn't have copy and paste. That was fine because you can iterate on software and user expectations are different. But you can't launch a car without airbags.

What complexity can the software folks eliminate and still have a viable product? The internal combustion drivetrain is a good example, though replacing it with electric has its own complexities (e.g. batteries and their control systems). But is there much more? Software-culture companies are having problems being clever with just door handles. Will you convince users they don't need reliable cup holders - a plain old boring mechanical part?

If you can't simplify much more, will just IC to electric swap make enough of a difference?

timcederman2• 11 years ago

Terrible example. When the iPhone launched, it could make calls and send messages extremely reliably. It was foremost a phone. Copy/paste wasn't a core part of that functionality.

DrStalker• 11 years ago

A better example would be launching a car without electric windows or air conditioning; you can get by without those features, people got by without those feature for decades before they became common but they are nice features to have that improves your experience driving the car. Copy & paste is not essential to a phone, and anyone who moved to an iPhone from a non-smart phone had never had that feature previously.

semi-extrinsic• 11 years ago

But you can't launch a car without airbags. What complexity can the software folks eliminate and still have a viable product?

This is a very insightful comment. Take as an example the recent 1.0L three-cylindre 120hp Ecoboost petrol engine by Ford. It's so small the entire thing fully assembled fits onto an A4 sheet of paper. It's not actually a very big part of the car.

Meanwhile, the Ford Fiesta which this goes into has increased its total weight by almost 50% since 1980. Factoring in weight reductions in the engine, that's 350+ kg worth of increased safety and comfort, none of which is particularly simple engineering, and none of which can be eliminated in a modern electric car.

jfoutz2• 11 years ago

I thought it was just a passive restraint system. The other answers i'm aware of are goofy - automatic seat belts, a padded bar that rests against your chest and locks on impact, or a cushion car, guaranteeing you'll have enough time to slow down because of huge crumple zones.

Who knows. Airbags are reliable, well understood technology. But maybe there is something better. With an active collision detection system, something else might work better.

sgustard• 11 years ago

In addition to the large legacy company alternatives (big tech companies, big car companies) there's lots of room for startups like Renovo Motors to innovate here. I agree the slower moving of those big companies has the most to worry about on multiple fronts.

gozo• 11 years ago

Uhm, no? Nokia was (relatively speaking) a software company. The South Korean and Chinese manufacturers, which are closer to production, excelled while the software companies like Nokia, RIM and Palm didn't. The iPhone was ahead of the market and despite the turbulence Nokia had caught up as of the N9. By then it didn't matter though. Because between Android being free and the importance of apps there were no longer much of a place for them in the market.

Hermel• 11 years ago

There are much more open questions than that. Will Google figure out how to reliably support a product for 20 years after it has been sold? Will Tesla figure out the logistics of manufacturing and marketing more than three models? (The VW group introduces 100 per year.) Will Apple figure out how to cost-effectively change winter and summer tires for all its customers twice a year? Can Microsoft become a sexy luxury brand like BMW?

Rezo3• 11 years ago

The proliferation of models is a huge burden, not a boon, and one of the big reasons that the then dominant phone manufacturers were not able to turn the ship around in time when the market changed.

It turns out, when you have 100 models, it's really hard to engage in "platform thinking". When the iPhone came out, it provided a single unified platform to target for the first time; despite all the effort other players had poured into their developer offerings they were organizationally not setup to succeed in providing a single target.

As a customer, do I even really want to have to research and pick between the BMW 328d Xdrive and 335i Xdrive Gran Turismo? If I use the configurator on BMW.com, can I even get the exact car I spec? No, of course not, at the end of playing with the tool I get a phone number for some shady dealer who's going to sell me what he has in stock unless I want to wait 3 months. If Apple releases the "iCar 2018" as a single model (customizable online, just check the box for 4WD), it will have all sorts of implications for the third party services and parts market. Just look at the whole ecosystem that has sprung up around Apple already. It's so much easier to buy fancy third party tires or whatever when you know it will be compatible with your car.

Question your assumptions. Why does Tesla need more than 3 models? Why does the tires need changing twice a year? Could a value prop be made where these concerns are just eliminated, which would be a competitive advantage for Apple and good for customers, while for traditional manufacturers and their dealers "fixing" this would cause a negative impact. Again, look at the incentives at play.

abalone4• 11 years ago

This is missing the point that Gassée raises about software culture. It's not just a question of the software folks figuring out how to build car hardware. It's, can the software folks figure out how to make bug free software?

Most Silicon Valley "cultures" are geared towards constant rapid innovation at the expense of more bugs. Apple for instance tends to favor adding groundbreaking new features as quickly as possible, followed by a big stability-oriented cleanup release once every few years or so (e.g. Snow Leopard, El Capitan). This results in complaints about software quality, but people deal with the bugs since the features are so desirable.

It's a different proposition when bugs = people get hurt.

Not a ton of SV companies have operated in those critical environments and those that do (medical) tend to be really "boring" and enterprise-y. This is going to be AS MUCH OR MORE of a shift as learning how to engineer a different kind of hardware.

alkonaut2• 11 years ago

I don't think you can draw any conclusions from buggy OSX software that Apple couldn't write a good robust realtime system for a car. Or that they couldn't build a car.

The people who would build car brains for Apple would be hired from Car manufacturers.

The analogy would be any non-car software made by car manufacturers. It usually stinks, but isn't made by the same people who build car sw. It stinks because it can, which is because it's cheaper and no one dies because the www build-your-car configurator has bugs.

As for actually manufacturing a car: If I was Apple I'd buy a facility like the recently closed Saab plant in Sweden, where there are lots of skilled people and a factory ready to use (It's actually still making cars at small scale for various small manufacturers)

nostrademons2• 11 years ago

There is a good chunk of the software industry that's been doing safety-critical software for 40 years. Think of avionics, medical devices, nuclear reactors, auto control software.

It's true that this sector is not generally associated with Silicon Valley. However, the programmers exist, and there's a large body of accumulated lore in how to write bug-free software. The big question is: can Apple/Google/Tesla hire them? It's not like the guys who build iCalendar are suddenly going to be working on self-driving cars, it's more that Apple's going to import people that have worked in similar industries to form the nucleus of their self-driving car groups. And my money is that they'll be successful: working conditions and compensation are much better at SV giants than at your typical enterprisey software consultancy that subcontracts for Boeing and Detroit.

Come to think of it, I wonder if Google's Alphabet restructuring was largely to enable the groups within it that need to work in a bug-free environment to develop bug-free cultures.

snowwrestler• 11 years ago

I question the premise that car software needs to be bug free. For example, there are car models on the road right now, which have sold millions of units, that are running software that is known to be terribly written and buggy. The Toyota Camry, for instance.

To succeed in the marketplace, the software in new cars just needs to be no worse than the car software currently in the marketplace. That is a much lower bar.

It's worth remembering that people made the exact same arguments about the iPhone: "this isn't a desktop computer that you can just reboot, a phone is safety critical--a 911 call MUST go through." Not a concern anymore.

kamaal3• 11 years ago

>basically an electric motor (or 2, or 4...) with virtually no serviceable parts.

With bulk of the people out there having no infrastructure to charge their electric cars. And needless to say if we know we are generating enough electricity to have countries full of electric cars.

weinzierl• 11 years ago

    … but does Apple’s personal computing software knowhow 
    translate into the high-reliability real-time code 
    required for a safe, reliable and, of course, elegant 
    electric car?

It doesn't have to. Not all the software in a car is high-reliability real-time code. My prediction is that Apple will make all the user facing software and buy all the rest. The reason I think so is that it's not enough to write the high-reliability real-time code. Besides thoroughly testing it you will have to get it approved by authorities - worldwide.

   Proud incumbent automakers look down on the interlopers. Dr.-Ing. Dieter 
   Zetsche, head of century-old Daimler-Benz, has no patience for Silicon Valley 
   companies intruding on his turf:


   “What is important for us is that the brain of the car, the operating system, is 
   not iOS or Android or someone else but it’s our brain […] We do not plan to 
   become the Foxconn of Apple,” Mr. Zetsche said, referring to the Chinese company 
   that manufactures iPhones.

That sounds like a Daimler car had a Daimler brain but that's just not true. The most important ECUs are made by companies like Bosch, Continental or TRW. These suppliers sell to all car manufacturers and they will be more than happy to supply one more.

Thinking about it this makes me really curious how Tesla handles this. Has anyone an idea which third party ECUs from which suppliers they use?

jarek7• 11 years ago

My prediction is that Apple will make all the user facing software and buy all the rest.

That's actually a very interesting point in light of the Foxconn comment - it seems to make a lot of sense for Apple to get the car hardware from a Chinese manufacturer, e.g. Geely.

abalone4• 11 years ago

My prediction is that Apple will make all the user facing software and buy all the rest.

That would only make sense if there was no further development of high-reliability, real-time functions. But a lot of the opportunity for advancement involves software controlling key driving functions, not just the user interface.

There is no way to get around having to engineer bug-free code in new assisted driving features. Which are about to get a lot more complex than they've ever been before.

spotman• 11 years ago

Toyota got a lot of heat over their software implementation surrounding the whole stuck accelerator debacle.

They have set the bar pretty low, despite their myriad of experience.

Pretty sure a technology company that designs cpu's for a living can do better than toyotas example of what not to do, at least in an electronics sense.

They have already hired staff that has a lot of experience in this field, and already had all the engineering chops and bank account to fund this.

While they have a lot of experience to catch up on in the auto industry, I don't think it will be amateur hour.

Has Apple ever released a cpu that had the same quality control issues as Apple maps?

lordnacho• 11 years ago

I don't see why Apple couldn't win this one as well. His criticisms are correct; ordinary software crashes all the time and people are cool with it. Heck, I even spent all of Friday discovering a Swift compiler bug. I'm sure Apple appreciate that certain kinds of software need to be more sturdy and can find the expertise somewhere.

But I don't think Apple's products tend to win because of better engineering. They somehow do OK on making the product and a stellar job of selling it. They've built a cult around their nice looking things with simple interfaces. Whenever they make something new, you can always find a friend (non technical) who praises their stuff. Undoubtedly, when they build this car, that same friend will be praising the 8th wonder of the world.

walshemj2• 11 years ago

I don't think I agree that OSX helps Apple - Apple succeeds inspite of OSX

Look at finder its worse than windows 95's file explorer

swiley2• 11 years ago

After Toyota I don't think I would trust a closed source self driving car.

ksec• 11 years ago

May be this Zero Error tolerance for Car Software will help shape the future direction of Swift ( If it hasn't already been done )

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