[artemisyna]

Of what I've heard of Zoox (admittedly 2nd or 3rd hand), there definitely has been some precidence for "engineering to fit design goals" rather than "fitting design around engineering realities". Wouldn't surprise me if this non-technical CEO was part of this.

[alphakappa]

I fail to understand the issue here - Successful companies do often stretch the limits of engineering to fit design goals (assuming that the design is an informed one to begin with). If design was always fitted around what is known to be possible with engineering, we would have much less innovation around.

[edshiro]

Also, wasn't this practice (i.e. engineering to fit design goals) what made Apple successful in releasing the iPod, iPhone, etc?

I am an engineer but welcome the perspective of designers and believe anyway that both need to work hand in hand.

In the case of driverless vehicles however, I am not sure the focus should overly be on design because this is a very hard problem that has yet to be solved, and maybe there was a way of designing a vehicle that was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, while mostly focusing on the technical challenges that must be overcome to get us to autonomy.

[shriver]

The key is that if your design goals are ambitious but achievable then you end up with a killer product. If your design goals are unrealistic or unachievable you tank what's achievable chasing a dream. Being frank the difference is probably that Steve Jobs had 30 years being a hands on expert in his field, and this guy was just some bloke who fancied building a self driving car.

All too often I've seen people set design goals when they don't understand the underlying problem. If jobs had targeted building an iPod that was physically smaller than the current smallest hard disk available he'd have been in this position.