Motors
Published on 27 December 2020 |
by gas contributor
27 December 2020 by Gas contributors
Originally published on EV Annex.
by Charles Morris
While researching my book, Tesla: How Elon Musk and Company Cooled Electric Cars, and Recovered the Automotive and Energy Industry, I was lucky enough to interview two of Tesla’s founders, Marc Tarpenning and Ian Wright. Wright offered a lot of insights into Tesla’s systems approach to its software, which was the opposite of the way old-fashioned automakers did things (and mostly still do), and it seems to be one of my favorite parts of the book. be.
He made these remarks in 2014 and he referred to events that happened years before, but what he said is still largely true today, and since then many writers have taken Wright’s observation that Tesla’s systems approach is one of its largest, reflects competitive advantages. I got miles from that interview – I referred to it in at least a dozen articles.
 Inside the tech-centric Tesla Model S (Source: Tesla) |
With the creation of the Model S, Tesla changed the way cars were developed and manufactured, although this was not clear at the time. ‘The way Toyota manufactures a car, the way they bump the metal and weld it together, paint and do all the interior pieces and put the car together, is hard to beat. I’m not sure Tesla has made any progress or even reached that level, ”Ian Wright told me (in 2014). ‘On the other hand, if you’re a tech engineer in Silicon Valley and you’re looking at the way modern cars are designed from an electronic point of view, to use an Australian expression, it’s like a dog’s breakfast. It does not appear that they have a systems architecture that we would call. ‘
People often describe the modern car as a ‘computer on wheels’, but it’s more like a few dozen small computers, not one. Unlike a modern computer network or software application, a (non-Tesla) car is not designed as a single system; it is an accident of separate, incompatible computer systems, each coming from a different provider. “I look out the window at my 2008 Volkswagen Touareg, and I bet there are sixty or seventy electronic black boxes, three hundred pounds of wiring harness and software from twenty different companies in it,” Ian Wright said. ‘The biggest reliability problem with these cars is the electronics and software. I think Tesla has taken a real perspective of Silicon Valley’s system architecture with the design of all the electronics in Model S. I do not know to what extent that way of doing things will translate to the big guys, but I think it is’ a very different way of doing it, and I expect that their electronics and software will eventually be more reliable than we are used to in cars. ”
All the software that Model S manages is integrated as a single, logical system, which, according to Wright, means: ‘less black boxes, a simpler wiring harness, more integrated software, fewer surprises if something goes wrong and other things do not work properly , or something strange is starting to happen. ”
Wright provided a practical example of how a mix can have a bad customer experience. ‘My Volkswagen Volkswagen has a nice color LCD here in the middle of the instrument cluster and it drives me crazy because there is enough space to have a lot of information about it, but they have divided it into a bunch of big fields. . One of the fields gives you the temperature outside – until the low fuel warning burns. If your fuel warning goes off, they exceed the temperature with the low fuel warning icon, and until you put more fuel in the car, you can no longer know what the outdoor temperature is. They could so easily move things around and put them down somewhere else, but they could not do that because the way they developed things, there was a specific crew that did it, a specific piece of code – it is done so. This is the kind of thing that Tesla gets right into their sleep with, and that the big guys are really struggling with. ”
The integrated approach also means that as technology improves, things can be upgraded quickly and smoothly. In the traditional car industry, improvements are usually only made with each new model year. A smartphone maker, on the other hand, can launch an upgrade or even an important new feature within a few weeks. As we have seen, Tesla has made several major upgrades to its vehicles without the owners having to do anything. To make similar changes to a traditional vehicle, you must return it to the dealer. As far as I know, no other car manufacturer has ever made an improvement or upgrade to an existing vehicle other than to fix a faulty part.
In an EV, electronics and software are the core of the vehicle, so if the major starts producing EVs, they will eventually be forced to take a more system-oriented approach (although this is unlikely to happen as long as they fit simply gas-powered models by dropping an electric drive). Furthermore, two other powerful trends come along with electrification: automation and connectivity. To keep up with this progress, a software-based approach is absolutely necessary. This is no small adjustment for the car manufacturers – it’s a revolution in the way they design and build their products. Building the 21st century electrified, autonomous, hyperconnected car with the current system would be like building a smartphone that has one chip and an operating system for telephony, another for the Internet, another for the camera, another for the music player, etc. Contains.
Not only is it a better job to design electronics and software – the problems are inherent in the structure of the industry. As Wright explained to me, although the majors improve their software systems, ‘they generally do not develop any of these things, they write a specification and send it to Tier 1 suppliers such as TRW, Siemens and Bosch [or, in the case of the Chevy Bolt, LG Chem]. If they still do that, I think they’ll still have a problem. ”
You just got an excerpt from chapter 9 of Tesla: How Elon Musk and Company Cooled Electric Cars, and Recovered the Automotive and Energy Industry. The rest of the chapter discusses Tesla’s battery innovations, the origins of the Supercharger network, Tesla’s safety features, Autopilot, and more. The next chapter explains how Tesla redefines not only the car but also the carmaker.
The book has been fully 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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