It looks like VW Group have fallen fowl of trying to combine the transition to BEVs with autonomous driving. There is no reason they should have had to wait on autonomous driving software in order to add more BEVs to their range. I don't believe autonomous driving is a deciding factor in the majority of purchase decisions at the moment, and as people tend to be loyal to a brand it's more important to get a BEV on the market that fits the category of the loyal customers.
VW have a good BEV platform, perfectly satisfactory in car software, and adequate automation. It's ridiculous they haven't got an estate (station wagon) at all yet, or to have expanded those that are available to all of the various brands.
"perfectly satisfactory in car software" is arguable. ID4 still doesn't have OTA update in US. Navigation and UI software inside the car is OK only because of Android Auto (CarPlay). I've also witnessed a number of instances where Nav software would freeze and apparently the only way to reset it was to park, get out of the car, close the door, wait few seconds and then get back in.
Yeah I’ve owned VWs for years and have always been basically happy with the cars’ software. We recently bought an EV, and even though the ID.4 checked pretty much all of our boxes, we skipped it entirely based on the steady drumbeat of software complaints.
> Yeah I’ve owned VWs for years and have always been basically happy with the cars’ software.
Not trying to be snarky but I can’t understand how one may be happy with a gps unit taking 30+ seconds to boot up in a modern car. That’s my average VW experience. BMW is instant, for comparison…
Well by “basically happy”, I mean to say that there are some occasional little quirks that I don’t love but I’ve personally never had any major frustrations or showstoppers.
I’ve wondered how much of this is a reaction to decaying road infrastructure. In the northeast, I’d be skeptical of sedan durability unless it had 6 inches of clearance. At that point, you might as well make an suv.
My parents' Ford Edge (mid-sized SUV)'s ride quality is much worse than most sedans I drove. I don't know if it's the big rims/thin tires or crappy suspensions; probably a combination of both. In any case, being an SUV is no guarantee of smoother rides, especially with modern SUVs trying to be more "sporty".
I think it's just a fashion, and when people realise they get less efficiency or space for the equivalent SUV they will re-consider saloon/estates/MPVs.
I think we've seen all the major automakers sandbagging their EV efforts for obvious reasons.
Attaching a nearly impossible requirement like self-driving to EVs is a convenient scapegoat for more delays while you continue milking your mature ICEV production from loyal customers...
It's rather caused by archaic approach of VW to car software. Tesla showed (almost decade ago) how should it be done. Years have passed and VW is not only behind the competition, but still in '00s. They were agile enough to fake NOx emission tests, but not enough to provide modern solutions for consumers.
I wouldn't say tesla's software practices should be emulated. Pushing random updates to prod OTA is terrible practice and look at the number of times cars have rebooted while driving
Honestly, i'm not a big Elon Fanboy, but as a german who has driven mostly newer VWs until 2021, the Tesla Software Quality since then is enough for me to outright say I never want a VW Engineer touch my car software again. Yes, their ID series is improving and even outperforming from the actual driving characteristics when it comes to assisted driving, but by god is the user experience horrible.
Driving and using a Tesla is fun in a way no VW ever was for me.
IMHO, as someone who worked in the German auto and semi industry, from my outside perspective, the main reason VW spun off Cariad to give it more independence form the crusty old mothership hoping this would lead to more innovations not possible within an org as big and as old as VW, and then they fucked it all up by putting the same crusty execs from the auto industry in charge at Cariad SW and it lead to the same dumpster fire as if it were part of VW group anyway, and then everyone was shocked things didn't work out the way they hoped.
It's a mistake I keep seeing repeated in many big German SW companies: put in charge some old geezer from traditional industry who has a PhD from a well known German uni, who hasn't wrote any code in over 20 years, and has a top-down approach to SW dev like his team was designing car engines in the '80's. Then realize things aren't working out, give him a golden parachute and hire another overpaid crusty guy just like him but from another big company to shake up the org and ultimately achieve the same "results". Rinse and repeat.
The problem is with German corporate leadership mentality which is highly traditional and therefore strictly top-down and nobody at the top is up to date on the shit-show the SW devs are dealing with in the trenches, nor do they care to address this. It's a tragedy of the commons.
As someone working in German big companies this is EXACTLY how things are being done, and 10 years later we are still doing things the same and fighting the same old problems (like having 17 different versions of the same software on customers installation).
This reminds me of how practically all BaFin license requirements have this personnel requirement i.e. management must have three years of academic experience and three years practical experience. In other words, the only people who get to start a new payment service provider (PSP) must have already worked in management at an existing PSP, essentially pulling up the ladder.
Ehhhh, I think they want to be PAID and PAMPERED like they work at Google. That's certainly not typical of Europe, automotive, or embedded hardware. Hey, anyone know how Tesla pays its software devs (outside of self-driving)?
I love how this is buried as the fifth point (and actually, isn't even the fifth point).
You want good software and software devs? Yeah, uh, hire and pay good people.
Time number one billion that some failed enterprise is discussed at the leadership level and everyone pretends that paying good people wouldn't have helped.
Instead, it's "management issues", aka the money you paid to execs that's the problem, not the people you know ACTUALLY MAKING YOUR FUCKING SOFTWARE.
IF you are a company with a CRITICAL software deficit, then I hate to tell you this, you probably need to spend money on good developers. Experienced, good developers.
Spinning off a new company under different management? That's deck chair rearranging. Actually, spinning off the software, which the parent company views as an annoying expense / cost and not a feature of quality or something that will close sales or build customer loyalty (which is HUGE in automotive) was a terrible idea, unless there was a fully top leadership endorsed billion dollar blank check to get it off the ground. Which of course, even without knowing, I know there wasn't buy-in.
Old car companies don't respect software. Name me one, just one, that provides software visibility of OBD-2 codes without having to buy some stupid OBD port that communicates with a smartphone? That provides techie metrics dashboards for fuel use, rpms, etc?
I mean, the DATA IS ON THE CAR'S INTERNAL NETWORK. That's why the OBD reader can read it.
Hate on Tesla and Elon all you want, but he fostered a company that had at least decent value in software. And I'm not even saying Tesla had GOOD software. It just has "OK" software, which is WAY better than any other company by a wide wide wide margin.
> IF you are a company with a CRITICAL software deficit, then I hate to tell you this, you probably need to spend money on good developers. Experienced, good developers.
I can assure you that VW has great developers. But developers only develop, there’s a whole layer of people who decide what and how it is developed.
As a VW ID4 owner, I say "Good." My overall summary of the vehicle is that I absolutely love the part of it that is a car. I absolutely loathe the part of it that is a computer.
The infotainment system is the worst piece of consumer technology I've interacted with in easily a decade or more. It's truly bottom tier. It would be better off if the only function it had was connecting to CarPlay and that's it. Of course, connecting to my phone via Bluetooth also takes 5+ minutes, so that is also subpar.
But, it isn't only the infotainment that's an issue. The software that controls core functionality of the car is busted. Some examples:
* Unlocking the passenger/rear doors. When using the key fob, sometimes they unlock and sometimes they don't. There's no rhyme or reason to what's going on. The lock/unlock capacitive "button" on the driver's door is essentially non-functional. I usually just end up leaning over and opening the passenger door manually rather than trying to figure out how to unlock it.
* I've had situations where it seems like the windows operate as a boolean rather than a float. Meaning, I put the window down about 1/3 of the way. But, when I tried to put it back up it just wouldn't move up AT ALL until I put the window fully down, then I could roll it back up. Almost like the isOpen flag variable had not flipped value.
* Many times I've gotten into the car and it gives me all kinds of warnings about the electrical system erring out. The only way to fix it is to put the car in park and physically get out of the car, shut the door, wait 10 seconds, then get back in.
* The collision avoidance system will routinely slam on the brakes for no reason when entering/backing out of my garage.
* The seat position profiles are just a cluster. It doesn't even get the seat position remotely close to where I saved it previously and setting/adjusting it is unintuitive.
The real question here is, why not Toyota? Their autonomous driving division is also a trash fire. Why don't traditional car companies seem to be able to manage "self-driving" projects?
It's not just the auto industry. A lot of industries struggle with managing software projects. If you think about it, it's the reason we have such a vaguely named thing as the "tech industry" to begin with. Tech firms are basically just normal firms that are good at managing software projects, and this skill is sufficiently rare/unique that it comes to define them.
As for why that is, well, you have to work in a non-tech company for a while to really see the problems. Suffice it to say that the gap between programmers and non-programmers in how they think and understand the process of developing software is enormous, and too large to bridge. You can't explain even things that would seem obvious and basic on this forum to non-tech people, because they just immediately reject it.
In a lot of "traditional" industries, because you "can't touch" or put it into inventory software is not seen as important "it is just there at the end". Furthermore there is a huge disconnect, because they don't understand software... everything "can later be fixed in software", the procurement department is incentivized to buy the cheapest hardware/chips they can get and you as a software developer are never asked if the requirements can be implemented on the hardware they procure leading to delays because you have to fit all the promised features into a shitty 5cent cheaper hardware and if it fails it's the software departments fault (looks like this is a bit the case in CARIAD when reading some german forums/articles).
The car industry reminds me of the construction industry. It's rife with decades-old institutions that are indifferent to quick changes in an ever software-dominated environment.
The thinking is, "if it ain't broken, then it ain't worth fixing." Unfortunately, recent advances by autonomous vehicle companies and EV makers have shifted the paradigm from a hardware-focus to a software one.
I think construction is also headed the same path as stick-built buildings are increasingly on the way out and more modular preassembled manufacturing is coming in.
It's good news for software companies and bad news for traditional construction and traditional auto.
I'm hanging onto a 2005 Jeep Wrangler despite several mechanical issues I'd rather not deal with, because I have zero confidence that I can keep a modern car running for decades.
Even 2005 sounds new to me. I drive cars from the 1980s.
I'd love to be able to buy a new car without any software. My phone does anything I would want to be able to do in a car. But it's not possible, due to a combination of regulations and what the mass market wants.
I think an analogy is "enterprise software". You always get the worst software when it's designed and approved by a committee that doesn't get hard user feedback (feedback in the sense that people just won't use it if it's bad). So things are released with shit usability. Add on the cost overruns and scope problems that come from people that don't really know software dictating top down what they think it should do, and you get what happens in most industries.
Yes, but they struggle with consumer software too (car software being consumer software, but also finance stuff is often terrible even when targeted as the mass market).
>Suffice it to say that the gap between programmers and non-programmers in how they think and understand the process of developing software is enormous, and too large to bridge.
Programmers speak programming languages. Common men speak human languages.
Incidentally, this is also why "AI" became such a big hit with the masses in such a short period of time: For the first time ever, common men can communicate with computers using human languages instead of programming languages.
> Programmers speak programming languages. Common men speak human languages.
Thats just a stereotype.
Lawyers speak legalese, managers speak managerial, electricians speak electrical, designers speak design languages, and politicians speak bullshit. And all of those languages can be employed/"translated" by "AI", there is no difference.
Or to put it another way, it all depends on the context. If you don't want to be understood by others you'll just come out as an asshole, and rightly so, whatever your profession.
If you aren't aware, the word "jargon" is the term for industry-specific language. It will organically evolve in any industry for a reason but it can be used intentionally or unintentionally to condescend to others outside that industry.
That is kind of tangential to software architecture, user interface and product development, the activities that define what the software will do. Speaking “human language” (aka user-centered design) is the utmost focus at this level.
Reducing such issues to “normal people can’t understand programmers” would be best left as a trope from
the early 2000s.
Let me put it this way then: "AI" allows common men to ask a computer questions using human languages, instead of using a string of esoteric keywords and symbols arranged in a way a computer understands (aka programming languages).
If you don't see or understand the true value behind that, well, I suppose you're a programmer.
I don't see any common men programming with AI. I see AI doing all the common man office jobs. It's great at generating emails, slide decks and spreadsheets.
I believe it's because of the top-down approach to software development. The amount of waterfall in those projects is insane and individual developers are just small cogs in the org and their input is not regarded as important. In German companies one has to be at least a PhD (preferably Privatdozent) to be taken seriously even if their PhD is completely outdated and they never wrote a line of code in their life.
> I believe it's because of the top-down approach to software development. The amount of waterfall in those projects is insane
It's more about consensus driven decision making and waiting to make a decision until all information is present : risk avoidance behaviour. You mix these two and it's a great recipe for disaster.
I think it's both. And ignorance/arrogance to the problem being them and their management styles. They still don't understand why they're getting outsmarted by Big Tech and China's KP.
It would be funny if it wasn't so sad because of the economical downward spiral this attitude is causing.
Best as I can tell from reporting, this is not about self driving at all.
VW (which owns Cariad?) is unhappy with the pace and quality of the structural software being produced. Structural software impacts both operation of the vehicle as well as “infotainment”.
There seems to be a lot of chatter that the German automobile manufacturers are hardware focused to a fault and don’t understand the needs/limitations of software development. Maybe that’s just gossip though.
Generally, for a long time they treated components with software the same as any other component: You buy it as a standalone thing from your suppliers, who make it according to your specifications, e.g. lots of the electronics would come from a "tier-1" like Bosch, who many cases farm out making of different parts to their suppliers, who then contract bits from subsubcontractors, ... and in the end everything gets plugged together. The car maker at the top of the pyramid is giving some goals/designs and tests if everything fits together and shouts down the chain if it doesn't. And for physical parts and contained software that does kind of work. It involves a lot of specification writing and -checking, but that's what mech eng orgs are good at. A simple digital instrument cluster isn't that different from an analogue one in that regard, in the end it is "hardware has to have this shape, fulfill this spec, display has to read the following CAN signals to show what's needed". Similarly for a navigation system or software on a engine control unit. Where exactly the lines between what was done in-house and what is contracted fell varied (e.g. some at least nominally controlled the software platform for e.g. the navigation/entertainment unit themselves, others bought that too from the Tier-1 and ordered design customization as needed), but in general the car company is mostly doing "managing" and coordination.
But this has a bunch of downsides:
If you don't have the expertise in-house, you are beholden to what your suppliers can or are willing to do. If they do bad work, you can shout at them (and car manufacturers are quite good at shouting at suppliers), but you can't fix or potentially not even properly evaluate it. Integration across subcontractor trees is difficult to make work well and leads to even more spec-writing and shifting blame if it doesn't go well. Since the tier-1 is probably also not a software company, the software expertise is somewhere deep down the contractor tree and not properly involved with the high-level decisions.
E.g. a common complaint is why the UI in cars is so sluggish: What do you expect if the people deciding about the hardware didn't have trustworthy input from people actually building the software and the software is a hodge-podge from multiple suppliers forced to work against interfaces one supplier made up without concern if its useful for the others... or even pass rudimentary common-sense tests.
It also gets way worse the more integrated things become. E.g. if you have a separate box for the navigation system (in some cars it's literally a box somewhere you can take out and replace if you get a map upgrade, which gets power and a screen connector from the car), there's little to no software integration needed. In a modern fancy-ish car, the expectation is obviously that this is all integrated in one UI, the navigation can appear in the instrument cluster, map updates should probably be online and not require bringing the car to a dealer, you want one central computer instead of multiple small ones, ...
So to stop all this falling apart, someone needs to own it. The Tier-1 could, but it also doesn't have a clue how and the manufacturers obviously don't want to give those more power, so they try to bring it in-house. But if you've never had a internal culture for software to grow this from, it is really hard to do that.
VW specifically said they'd do it by force, with plans to hire thousands of software people over a few years to build a totally new software division that would own the entire stack from scratch. It's going about as well as one would think something like that would go...
Other manufacturers who noticed this earlier and let it grow slowly are faring better. Some had more experimental "labs" divisions which were closer to the software world, whose expertise now can be used. Some have accepted they have to farm some of it out and e.g. adopt Android Automotive, even though the industry was very hesitant about that initially (because it gives Google all that juicy user data and ownership over the connectivity services the industry really would rather control itself).
That's mostly because you can't run a big automotive software project and not say that, not because it's in any way doing direct work towards that goal.
Not really, limited to selected parts of the Autobahn and the car will throw you under the proverbial bus 10 seconds before it would make a fatal mistake. It’s all just PR.
No. The pay is mostly ok, the project management is shit. Basically in the automotive industry, you get important in your company when what you produce is a big part of the BOM of the car. Software is $0 in the BOM, so you are treated like shit.
Source: I've worked for the automotive industry for ~20 years, on and off.
no, it's just unintuitive but also it makes sense.
first, the software is traditionally up-front cost, development cost, and as such it's not accounted for in the production cost aka BOM of an individual vehicle.
but even if you'd jump the accounting hoop of spreading the software costs to the vehicles it's neclegible compared to other cost factors.
VW group builds 10mio cars a year. the core ECUs board computers are shared across all models and makes. a major revision happens every 3-4 years. that's 30-40 mio units you spread the software creation costs to.
the major cost (as in 90% of that) is going to be silicon, PCB, housing, the physical part. and share of ECU costs in the overall vehicle costs likewise is in the low 2 digit percentage, should it even reach that.
No. The marginal cost of the software in a car is zero. There is a development cost, sure -- just as there are other design costs. But in terms of what the company has to spend to build one more car, the software costs nothing, unlike the steel, wire, tires, glass, etc.
No, it's that SW is the component on the BOM that's the easiest to offshore so it's subject to the strictest race-to-the-bottom account engineering possible.
All these big auto companies like VW, GM, etc. used to do in terms of SW dev is write the spec and requirements and then contract out the dev work to the lowest bidder (Continental, Bosch, Valeo, Denso, etc.)
This makes sense how Tesla markets FSD in terms of traditional accounting. While not a part of official BOM, $15k for self driving is a big chunk of the final price for those who select it.
Then you heard wrong. I left European automotive SW because they paid peanuts. Sure, maybe there's some requirements engineers at Porsche or some niche freelance consultants in safety who makes bank, but everyone else makes peanuts. IC pay tops out at 80k per ear and that's in an expensive city like Stuttgart or Munich.
I didn’t hear anything “wrong” at all. I know people personally which make a lot more than that. If you did R&D for 80k in a senior role you got robbed.
My brother-in-law has one of the first Porsche Taycans delivered in the UK. The software bugs were so dire they upgraded him to the next model year for free, but it's still bad. Like all the legacy dinosaurs with no clue about software, VW is so far behind it doesn't even know how far behind it is.
