[hobofan]

On the flipside, I think it's funny how easy some of the big car companies thought it would be to build a self-driving car. The general attitude I've seen from German car manufacturers the last years was one of "we just need to pour a bunch of software engineers on the problem". Maybe this deal is a start of a mentality-shift there.

[carlmr]

I think both companies could gain from this.

A lot of SV companies only know software. And in software it's easy to fix bugs on the product later. Something that's impossible for mechanical things. That's why they all think it's easy to build your own car.

A car is fairly simple, but mass producing it, and getting all the suppliers to work together properly is hard.

Car manufacturers on the other hand have the tendency to treat software like hardware, because the leaders come from hardware. This leads to cultural problems with creating software.

[blattimwind]

Perhaps publicly, but people tell me that management is acutely aware how hard the problem is; this stems in part from the experience developing the various assistance systems, which was neither cheap nor easy.

[hobofan]

Maybe some parts of management, but my impression is that it's also mostly communicated like that internally. I based my comment on conversations I had with people working at the car companies (Audi, BMW, VW and Mercedes), and all expressed that view in slight variations.