[MichaelCollins]

I wish Tesla would cut it out with the computerized car bullshit and focus on making the best battery cars instead. They shouldn't need bullshit like "it will be fiscally irresponsible to not buy our cars because it will be a robotaxi that pays for itself"; it imperils the long-term success of the company for a short-term boost in sales. And it alienates anybody with a modicum of critical thinking.

[mrtksn]

Okay but the genius of Musk was this computerised car stuff and it's exactly where the traditional car manufacturers fail. Just recently the CEO of VW changed and the important part of the failure of the previous CEO was their shit software on their electric cars.

It's not like Tesla managed to make cheap electric cars? They managed to make cars with good computers and this is something that people actually want.

Essentially, Tesla made the first usable as daily driver electric car by promising stuff that people believed they want(but very hard to make) so they can collect money and make sales but doing stuff that people actually needed(within the reach of the current technology) to live with electric cars.

[mrguyorama]

Actually, I desperately want the software world to stay as far away from cars as possible. Even in a VW, I know I will go 100k miles with zero issues with most of the stuff. Someone somewhere wants to put javascript between me and that, and I hope they have a bad life.

[mrtksn]

I suspect you are thinking of touchscreens, not necessarily the computerised cars?

[mrguyorama]

No, as soon as we allow average devs (instead of people working on much more limited ECU software) there will be someone insisting they should put node into it, and run some part of the car on some stack that involves 3 gb of js dependencies, and will inevitably only work half the time, outside of their extremely limited testing.

Car software will only be reliable as long as it doesn't seem prestigious to write software for cars.

[MichaelCollins]

Furthermore, before they put cell radios in cars, you could count on the software buried deep in your car working in a consistent manner. Now with over-the-air updates, your car can suffer a software regression at any time.

[sidewndr46]

Musk didn't even contribute to the automotive technology, at all. It's the result of an acquisition of a company called "AC Propulsion".