| Car infotainment systems run ARM SoCs, much like an iPhone. To compare the complexity of a car and a phone (any modern phone - they're all fundamentally similar inside) belies immense ignorance of both. Phones are functionally complex, but physically quite simple. The complexity is dealt with by the chip fab and software. Electronic manufacturing processes are basically the same for every device, and so are very well understood and optimised. A phone is a model of system abstraction. The incredible complexity of the processor and digital logic is abstracted into little black boxes which are then soldered to a PCB. The assembly is then a straightforward sandwich of all the bits. I don't think anyone's arguing that phones are not complex, but that cars have an order of magnitude more bits to assemble, and that means manufacturing complexity that the existing manufacturers obtained through decades of iteration. Tesla's a great example - they completely underestimated the complexity of manufacturing (building the machine to make the machine), spent billions of dollars on it and are still struggling with poor fit and finish. Of course, any company can put the processes in place to build a modern car - it will just take time. To argue that a phone requires as many assembly processes as a car is simply ludicrous. |