More Apple Car Thoughts: Software Culture

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.<p>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 &quot;innovative&quot; side (no more haggling the price of a car for example, 1st party servicing, etc).<p>Forget the Palm quote. Look at Nokia in 2007, when the iPhone was introduced: 50%+ marketshare, 100,000+ employees, 100 million+ devices&#x2F;year, they already had &quot;advanced&quot; 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.

<p><pre><code> … 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? </code></pre> It doesn&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p><pre><code> 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. </code></pre> That sounds like a Daimler car had a Daimler brain but that&#x27;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.<p>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?

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].<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;UX and Software that controls the vehicle would be a better fit over here.<p>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&#x27;t particularly play to the slow moving German company mindset. I think that as long as there&#x27;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 &quot;softer&quot; qualities, I can see a good symbiosis with the culture out here in the valley.<p>That being said, meeting all of these people and seeing the companies within a 20 minute drive was an entertaining turn of events.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@37.3866231,-122.0357596,3a,15y,243.23h,88.67t&#x2F;data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sus2JnQFTcKWtu8UHjbe4_A!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@37.3866231,-122.0357596,3a,15y,...</a><p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mbrdna.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mbrdna.com&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vwerl.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vwerl.com&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bosch.us&#x2F;content&#x2F;language1&#x2F;html&#x2F;rtc.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bosch.us&#x2F;content&#x2F;language1&#x2F;html&#x2F;rtc.htm</a>

I love the quote from Ed Colligan:<p>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.”

Good point, but I think they already have the culture necessary in whatever group is responsible for their CPU design. That&#x27;s a low-fault tolerance environment, too.<p>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.<p>I think Tesla&#x27;s on to something, but it&#x27;s not software. I don&#x27;t think it will necessarily transfer well to Apple.

Toyota got a lot of heat over their software implementation surrounding the whole stuck accelerator debacle.<p>They have set the bar pretty low, despite their myriad of experience.<p>Pretty sure a technology company that designs cpu&#x27;s for a living can do better than toyotas example of what not to do, at least in an electronics sense.<p>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.<p>While they have a lot of experience to catch up on in the auto industry, I don&#x27;t think it will be amateur hour.<p>Has Apple ever released a cpu that had the same quality control issues as Apple maps?

Lutz also recently said he thinks Tesla is in huge trouble and that (I&#x27;m going to paraphrase here) &quot;we tried running our own retail locations at bmw and they are much too expensive so they need to get rid of them asap&quot;.<p>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.

After Toyota I don&#x27;t think I would trust a closed source self driving car.

I don&#x27;t see why Apple couldn&#x27;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&#x27;m sure Apple appreciate that certain kinds of software need to be more sturdy and can find the expertise somewhere.<p>But I don&#x27;t think Apple&#x27;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&#x27;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.

May be this Zero Error tolerance for Car Software will help shape the future direction of Swift ( If it hasn&#x27;t already been done )

I don&#x27;t think I agree that OSX helps Apple - Apple succeeds inspite of OSX<p>Look at finder its worse than windows 95&#x27;s file explorer

It&#x27;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&#x27;s where Apple will be king, the agility to safely update.

Apple&#x27;s software culture is not suitable for cars. You need real time, reliable, simple and rock hard.<p>Do you really want the company that created iTunes for windows to drive your car?

Note the author: Jean-Louis Gassée. He&#x27;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&#x27;s mostly been a pundit.