[thuddrff567gg]

This seems to be the classic way in which management types destroy technical companies. Same thing happened a decade back in electronics companies in Japan (Sony comes to mind).

Technical competence is generally very hard to judge and often even harder replace. It's not surprising that the same management types are salivating at the thought of replacing people with AI.

[ty6853]

Ghosn was trained as an engineer at École des Mines de Paris after a humble background in the 3rd world including continual sickness from unsanitary waterwater. He worked from the bottom up in R&D at Michelin and did the impossible turning it around during hyperinflation period in Brazil.

By all estimations he's a genius with as good of chops as anyone could ask for his responsibilities, with a unique set of citizenship, connections, and multilingualism to go with it. Even his escape from Japan was just stunningly executed and the perfect selection of professionals with technical competence to pull it off.

[namdnay]

He actually did X-Mines, (École polytechnique then detached to Mines), which means he was in the dozen top science students of his year in France

[hmmm-i-wonder]

A genius at some things certainly. I don't know enough to judge his early successes but his more recent ones seem to have a theme of constant consolidation and mergers with clear short term benefits but medium and long term shaky outcomes. Then again that's the trend of all markets the last few decades.

Oh and financial fraud appears to be one of the things he was good at based on the allegations from Nissan and Renault among others.

[germinalphrase]

“Even his escape from Japan was just stunningly executed and the perfect selection of professionals with technical competence to pull it off.”

I’m only generally aware of the series of events here. Any good write ups?

[rwmj]

There's a good BBC documentary if you're able to find it. The original source was: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000xw3j

[7thpower]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/carlos-ghosn-escape-japan-priva...

There is a series on Apple as well.

[hengheng]

MotorTrend's "The InEVitable" podcast has an episode with the WSJ guy that is a lot longer and while less information-dense, it is more colorful and still gets the story across pretty comprehensively.

https://pca.st/episode/20821dad-77e6-4e04-a97c-969661953c77

[monkeydust]

Can highly recommend the Apple series, was a great documentary.

[csomar]

There is a good netflix series about it.

[raverbashing]

He's certainly known for thinking outside the box. (but not always ;) )

[alexey-salmin]

I don't know, the Renault Logan (and the B platform in general) was extremely good from the engineering standpoint. Cheap, reliable, easy to maintain, easy to fix. The technical competence in building gasoline cars was definitely there.

They missed the electric wave sure, but as with any innovations the more competent you are in the previous wave of technology the harder it is to switch to the new one. But it's a different kind of problem.

[namdnay]

M not sure you can even say they missed the electric wave - the Zoe and Leaf were some of the earliest mass market electric cars

[jorvi]

The Leaf 2 was and is a very good EV for its price point.

Its weird how Toyota had the first mass-market PHEV with the Prius but got hyperfixated on hydrogen cars, and Nissan had one of the most successful BEVs (Leaf 2, maybe even Leaf 1) and just sort-of gave up. I vaguely remember Honda having a decent EV.

I wonder what makes EVs so antithetical to Japanese car companies..

[panick21_]

All of Japan got obsessed with they whole 'hydrogen economy' nonsense. This was just the generally agree on 'future' of the economy.

In my opinion this is complete nonsense and after decades very little has happened.

Even for planes I don't think its the future. Just going one step further and making SAF is just a better plan.

With hopefully more trains, and electric planes for many shorter routes.

[rightbyte]

At the time hydrogen was not nonsense. Good lithium batteries happened.

Hydrogen is very impractical. Leaks easely and the pressure involved is scary. It is no surprise that good alternatives more or less scrapped the whole thing.

[ebiester]

There's an alternative future where some genius figured out a technical innovation for hydrogen and batteries struggle to scale. There are definite disadvantages to hydrogen in retrospect, but some of that has to do with the relative success of the engineers.

[adolph]

Hydrogen is also not particularly "green" without further spending for generation capacity.

Currently, most hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, specifically natural gas. Electricity—from the grid or from renewable sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, or biomass—is also currently used to produce hydrogen. In the longer term, solar energy and biomass can be used more directly to generate hydrogen.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-resources

[pfdietz]

And expensive, which is the real killer.

(Noting that this is hydrogen for vehicles; hydrogen in other applications are separate matters that should not be painted with the same broad brush.)

[teleforce]

> The technical competence in building gasoline cars was definitely there

I'm not sure about your statement here after the wet timing belt inside engine debacle for many European cars engines including Renault that's still existed until today. It's a total disregards of the laws on material physics and chemistry [1], [2].

[1] Wet Belt in Oil Engines: Who Approved This and Why Is It Still Being Made [video]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SASSFjIt5I

[2] Why So Many People Hate Wet Timing Belts:

https://www.theautopian.com/why-so-many-people-hate-wet-timi...

[consp]

While all true people also do not service their cars and these must be serviced on a regular interval with non standard components. Still a stupid design though which should never have been out into production. Glad my car has a chain, even had one in the past with a wonky guide which made lots of noise but worked until the end without issues (write-off was not engine related but purely economical, expensive tires brakes etc).

[hammock]

The wet timing belt reduces fuel consumption by about 1% so you can thank efficiency requirements for that.

[paganel]

Just saw a social media post of a guy here from Romania going with his first generation Logan all the way to Eastern Siberia / Mongolia. Great cars.

[Gud]

>They missed the electric wave sure, but as with any innovations the more competent you are in the previous wave of technology the harder it is to switch to the new one. But it's a different kind of problem.

I disagree with this statement.

The greatest engineer, scientist and inventor of all time, Stanford Ovshinsky, absolutely had no problem excelling in any field he put his mind to.

[darkerside]

It's incontrovertibly true at the organizational level, not necessarily the personal. Individuals can be polymaths, and I would posit that success in one domain can actually predict success in others.

Organizations OTOH typically develop inertia when it comes to their goals and purpose. Any change takes time to communicate through the organization for one thing. People are conditioned to push the Pavlovian success buttons of the past, for another. Managing budgets, stakeholder expectations, and the disconnect between leadership and the ground level are a whole other class of issues.

[mashepp]

> The greatest engineer, scientist and inventor of all time, Stanford Ovshinsky, absolutely had no problem excelling in any field he put his mind to.

So, because the greatest engineer according to your words excels at something. So it's easy for everybody to do the same?

[Gud]

”the most competent”.

Possibly there was a smarter mechanical engineer than Mr. Ovshinsky, it would be hard for anyone to argue he wasn’t in the top 0.1% in his field(s).

Why a top engineer in the field of making petrol powered cars shouldn’t be able to quickly learn a “new field”, using quotation marks here because electric cars have been around for >100 years, is beyond my understanding.

[idiotsecant]

Do you think individual technical contribution is the hardest part of retooling an entire industrial supply chain? Making a car is easy.

[thechao]

As per "Gung Ho", starring ~Batman~ Michael Keaton.

[thuddrff567gg]

I don't mean to claim that Renault is technically incompetent (obv. that's false).

I find that these companies have something very unique about themselves in terms of culture. And you lose a lot when you try to change it.

For eg. a lot of expats in Tokyo have this attitude that Japanese companies are dim-wits and that they have "westernize" and become English-speaking techbros (Rakuten calls this English-nization).

There might be some things that can be emulated better, but the solution always tends to be a bit too... christian, or rather monotheistic (ie . wipe out everything before and mass replace).

[unyttigfjelltol]

> Technical competence is generally very hard to judge

At an end-user level it always was easy to judge that Honda was at the top for technical competence. The same it true for judging the bottom rung. You can judge by favoring high quality products, or by disfavoring businesses that try to sell you on sizzle and "fun". It's all the same.

[makeitdouble]

Could you expend on the parrallel you see with Sony ?

I was under the impression it mostly failed because of how bad it was at software, and the strategy tax hitting them heavily as their ecosystem was penalized by that weakness, so I'd be glad to hear a different take.

[m463]

I kind of wonder if the endgame for all of this is one-product-per-company.

The company comes into being to make widget x, and never cares / is able to make another product again.

I mean, that's kind of how it all happens anyway. The people who stick through things and make the thing go away anyway. the ip is then acquired.

[mikepurvis]

That seems like the current model in tech, to the point that companies are eventually renamed for their only product (RIM -> BlackBerry, Sun -> JAVA, dotCloud -> Docker), but there are also a few Asian megacorps that have their fingers in seemingly everything, think of Yamaha and Mitsubishi.

[wilsynet]

I do not recall Sun being renamed into “Java”. It was acquired by Oracle as Sun Microsystems.

[devchix]

Sun changed its stock ticker from SUNW to JAVA. It never mattered for a dying company. Solaris packages were named SUNWxxxx, and was never renamed.

[pnp]

Correct, I recall the stock ticker symbol was renamed to JAVA, but not the company.

[mikepurvis]

Yes I should have clarified that that was stock ticker (or found another actual example).

[achenet]

to my knowledge, Sun never actually made money off of Java, their main source of revenue was always selling hardware (indeed, one of the reasons Oracle bought them out was because Oracle was one of the biggest consumers of Sun's hardware).

[Mistletoe]

Wouldn’t you say this is what the current ruling party of the government is doing to the USA? Seems eerily the same to me.