[averageRoyalty]

I understand the concept, but the question I have is why?

These companies have huge wallets, and can surely scoop up a smaller automative microcontroller company and bring it in-house? It seems like a problem than enough money could solve quickly, but they've been doing horribly at this for decades now.

[garyfirestorm]

I work in one of the big three - the culture here is more waterfall and less agile. They decided at some point ‘we don’t need to be experts in building systems, we should only be good at spec’cing them and putting them together’ This leads to a mindset of relying on suppliers for changing even one line of code and at their mercy. Talent leaves because they didn’t get to do any of the fun stuff. And you’re left with bunch of MBAs trying to wing it in what is available which is - no talent, bunch of admineers, and a long list of supplier bills. They go for cheapest component they can spec for a given feature cutting 4MB memory will save 5 cents per car, we sell half a million cars, that’s big savings! I can go on and on about this, but one of us even tried to be Tesla trying to build our own zonal architecture - and are currently struggling due to costs, tarrifs and turnover. Also you can’t overnight change this mindset - building vs assembling. But there has to be some way and I’m too about to walk out the door due to ~10yrs of frustrations.

[whiteboardr]

Get out if you can!

Spent 7 years at the three pointed star within design and UX - one day, when i’m over all i had to witness and experience i’ll write a book about the downfall of the german automotive industry.

It’s all politics and due to constant battles and changing ownership throughout departments they won’t ever have a solid foundation. And i dare to assume that this goes for most of the automotive industry.

It’s sad to see that a once driving force of innovation is stumbling over its own arrogance and ignorance.

A major factor contributing to this are cost saving measures from the early 2000s where most of them stopped in-house research and development giving most of the work to contractors - a very expensive cost saving measure long term.

We’re down to them using “technology” as a seasoning for consumption like a fancy restaurant - very little long term thinking.

[vachina]

Yeah, and then those contractors (like Continental) has sub-contractors (like Akka) and they have sub-sub-contractors (some random Indian software company) working on the side mirror winding logic.

In German cities with automotive industry, you’ll find thousands of these satellite companies.

[rapsey]

And in Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Slovenia, etc.

[0xFNaaNg]

> downfall of the german automotive industry

I hear that kind of statements all the time but if you take like real important car things germans are (still) pretty good: their cars handle really well, powertraian usually works perfectly smooth (or sporty), ergonomics is good to perfect, it will not rust for decades, list goes on ... The real things killing germans I think: cars are expensive and unreliable

[whiteboardr]

The main topic is software and it is still treated like a part you can just outsource and plug in.

Since cars are primarily being bought by sculptural aesthetics of the exterior and above all their brand they continue being bought for those who feel the need of a status symbol.

At the core there is still a lack of a long term strategy and above all stability to build on - not saying it is an easy task.

In the end the customer has to suffer with abysmal usability, reliability and ever changing mental models. And don’t get me started about the touchscreens everywhere situation…

It isn’t just software though - VW moving development and above all production engineering and planning to china since they failed coming up with an efficient solution in Wolfsburg is basically saying it all. [1]

Dire times ahead and i hope for the best.

[1] https://youtu.be/4AprfR8Xkio?si=xKXUdgt5BRyZKRNE

[fragmede]

Given that the driving characteristics of most of the cars on the road don't match a BMW, what're the real "real important car things"? The revealed preference seems to be that the things you listed aren't actually that important. Long term cost is. Maintenance cost is. Not having to bring your car to the dealership for service is. Having the car have a long lifetime is. Handling well is nice; sporty drivetrain is nice; but that sort of stuff is clearly just a luxury, and the bottom dropped out of the luxury market recently (see: LVMH restructuring). If you're going to buy a sporty luxury car, why not get a Porsche or something with more cachet? Obviously there are reasons, but BMW's in an awkward position.

[0xFNaaNg]

> what're the real "real important car things"?

A good design from engineering standpoint. You feel it just instantly when you use the product. Interior is nice and will accommodate just about every possible driver comfortably with every control reachable. Suspension just works frkn great no matter how it was tuned (sporty or comfortable) and no matter how simple the design is. Same for drivetrain, you will acelerate/decelerate precisely how much you'd expect. And it's not a luxury it's a norm, even cheapest german or french cars have all this things sorted out. I'm speaking for the EU market though)

[mlrtime]

Agreed, Germany still makes some of the best cars in the world. Who is making them better?

[slaw]

Huawei,Xiaomi,Xpeng.

For example

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maextro_S800

[andrewflnr]

> They decided at some point ‘we don’t need to be experts in building systems...

So they've just chosen death. Fantastic, great to hear.

[pjc50]

Well, yes. The legacy car companies are ossified. They want to keep churning out minute variations on the same cars, and regard software as a thin layer for the entertainment system. They don't want to adapt to EVs, which force a redesign of the car as a whole. They're going to get run over by Chinese companies unless they can beg for tariffs to prop up their un-innovation.

[mihaaly]

Isn't the trouble that agile is not compatible with things that has to be thoroughly made, 'finalized before release', like in every mission critical production? Casuality and the dyamic free spirit primised has much much less space here.

This is not sexy. This is important.

Needs different mindsets than the software folks grew up along in the past decades. Yes! Yes! There are much much more sexy topics to focus on for an agile software maker, that yields better looking results seemingly instantly. Compared to the boring finalization and coordination - oh, you devil bastard, coordination - heavy activities.

Don't take me seriously, speculating heavily.

[doodlebugging]

> They go for cheapest component they can spec for a given feature cutting 4MB memory will save 5 cents per car, we sell half a million cars, that’s big savings!

I'm tired. Been out in the sun all day. Explain this to me please.

When I do the math I get 500000 * $0.05 = $25000

That's a small drop in a large bucket of their gross income or net profits.

EDIT: Harsh sun must've burned a few of my processors. I see now that this would only be one small change that saved an inconsequential amount of money. But each group is incentivized to produce minor changes like this that save small amounts and that those amounts do add to substantial savings and help complete the process of enshittification of the ownership and driving experience for those who choose to buy one of these vehicles.

[tqi]

Rinse and repeat across hundreds of components and your team "pays for itself"

"We found $X cost savings" is the easiest path the promotion. It's measurable, cleanly attributable, and immediate, while the downsides are not. Maybe perform is bad bc they skimped on memory, or maybe it's because the software team sucks. Maybe it means future updates are hamstrung, but who cares the bonus checks cleared years ago. Besides, you probably got promoted to a bigger / better role by now, and who can remember who decided what when?

[arkh]

And with the help of software your get: this algorithm works well to recognize signs using 2 cameras. We can alter it a little to make it work with 1 camera (huge savings) and losing like 10% accuracy. With a cheaper camera we lose again some accuracy but even more savings.

Now you get a shitty feature for savings while the people who implemented it can go cry in a corner thinking about their good version.

[colejohnson66]

"We asked one of the software guys if we 'could' use a single camera, and they said, 'uh... possibly?', so we pushed through!"

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Not just the owners, but the other engineers.

I have never worked in the auto industry, but I was an embedded software engineer at an F500 company that loved to just throw hardware "over the wall" to the SW engineers.

I had come from a very small company and working like this made no sense to me. After a particularly annoying discovery I was talking to one of the EE's and he explained it to me. "You see, the guy who designed that controller knows nothing about software. He just has a list of specs to meet, and he gets a processor, wires a bunch of peripherals to it, and releases a circuit board. If you're lucky, the SW guy who sat in the design reviews made sure to get a good enough processor to make your job easier. If not, you're SOL because as long as the hardware meets all the requirements they gave him, no one is going to want to change anything."

In this case, the engineer was incentivized to save a whopping $0.50 on a machine that cost around $2,000 to build. And for lack of that $.50 part, software spent hundreds of hours adding code to find a way to implement the behavior that it would have provided. Not to mention all the Test hours needed to verify that it worked as expected.

Paradoxically, I also saw the opposite behavior on the same project: people adding extremely complex hardware to solve simple problems because the company paid very well for patents, so of course everyone had an incentive to produce patentable designs.

[noisy_boy]

That is one component in one model. Car makers have several models with maybe hundreds (or thousands?) of electrical components. Plus "cost-saving" has always been a surefire way of ensuring bonus.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Penny wise, pound foolish

[smogcutter]

It’s very obviously a rhetorical exaggeration.

[garyfirestorm]

Yes sometimes it’s a dollar or two and it really adds up quick. Sometimes 10’s of dollars. That door speaker can be few dollars cheap - you may get 2% more THD in a frequency band… the conversations can be really reduced down to ‘meh subjectively not noticeable’ but will save us a million. Add few of these things and now you have a shitty radio system but 5 mil in bank.

[Marsymars]

Speakers are a bit of a funny one, because, with the important condition that the amp needs to not be crap, they’re pretty straightforward to upgrade for the end user.

[olyjohn]

Yes but you make this small 5 cent change to 100 components and it adds up.

[jandrewrogers]

There have been attempts at it. Unfortunately, they consistently botch the execution so badly that most of the executives in the business have PTSD from the experience. And these were very expensive failures that become lore inside the companies. When they do acquisitions of small companies entering this market those end up getting smothered by the culture of the automotive companies.

Everyone has spent a mountain of money on this problem but spent it all assiduously avoiding addressing the root causes.

[whatever1]

The answer is that current car platforms were designed with flexibility as first goal.

Car companies realized early on they could outsource component development and production to 3rd parties and they could make them bid each other to further lower the prices.

So their platforms were optimized to be able to swap component vendors very easily (to achieve lowest costs).

Of course the vendors are not 100% interchangeable and building a platform to accommodate everyone has to make sacrifices.Aka target the least common denominator across all vendors.

[kulahan]

Then maybe they should let me buy some better damn chips so the experience isn’t so laggy.

I know, I know, shooting the messenger…

[liveoneggs]

too bad computers aren't spark plugs

[whatever1]

To be fair, this seemed to be the right strategy since they were able to be profitable in a very crowded market. Yes, the new companies try to verticalize everything from components to software, but none of them seem profitable (marginally Tesla passes the bar, but not so sure if you took away all the subsidies and carbon offsets).

So maybe the legacy guys were right all along?

[garyfirestorm]

I can tell you this works if your product doesn’t need frequent upgrades/updates and isn’t cohesive. In legacy auto world, you ask for one line of code change and the supplier slaps 100k bill. This is generally why things look old, outdated, carried over and buggy.

[whatever1]

I totally agree with what you say. I am just not sure if the car market is willing to pay a premium to have this nicer fully integrated experience. Maybe there is space for a couple of premium makers.

[imglorp]

My preference would be do less! Shift all the nav and entertainment to phone integration; stop trying to make half assed shit versions of those. How many billions were spent on that?

[imglorp]

To what extent was a clean sheet design a huge advantage over the legacy makers?

And to what extent were the subsidies an advantage? They phased out after 200,000 units and Tesla has sold millions.

[natch]

Tesla took the hit for the transportation industry, working their asses off and pioneering the costly ramp up to mass production of EVs, so the subsidies are the government compensating them for having not taken the easy path that the legacy auto makers are taking with their continued production of polluting gas cars and their half-hearted introduction of compliance cars.

Since government wants to encourage transition to sustainable energy, and oil and gas have been subsidized for decades, not to mention the tens of billions in bailouts for legacy auto, putting things in perspective shows that legacy auto should get the brunt of any criticism here, and the relatively smaller subsidies to Tesla are offsetting the larger investment Tesla has made.

The beauty of it is that the money is actually paid to Tesla by the legacy auto makers who have not stepped up or have stepped up only at a scale of virtue signaling, if you look at the sales numbers.

[kalleboo]

In Q1 2025, Tesla made $595 million on selling environmental credits/carbon offsets to other car makers. Net income for the whole company was $409 million.

[whatever1]

Tesla has earned since 2017 over $10B in carbon offsets. That is in addition to the state and federal incentives.

[tashoecraft]

How many issues due large companies run into thinking they can just throw money at it? Just look at google and stadia, or amazon and their failed game studio. They have immense money and knowledge and ended up with nothing.

Each car has dozens to 100+ ecus, written in different languages, by different teams, different requirements, and different companies. Some are proprietary. Ford can’t just tell Bosch, hey your abs module needs to now integrate with our api, multiplied by 100+ companies. The legacy car makers need to revisit everything, and move most of it in-house.

[Peanuts99]

At the same time, we've had car companies putting out cars for 20 years with 10s of different modules built by different companies and things have been working just fine. Suddenly it's a problem because apparently everyone needs a giant screen on the dashboard?

[bsder]

Because the auto companies outsource everything, lay the risk onto the outsourced companies and expect that some significant percentage of them will go bankrupt every year.

With that kind of adversarial relationship, you are never getting anything above the barest minimum of competence.

[datavirtue]

Smells like Boeing.

[speeder]

I worked at BMW. I knew there was a project in there, using a certain ECU that was being quite problematic (as in, project being slightly late because ECU was a bit buggy and sometimes crashed when it was supposed to have almost 100% of uptime for legal reasons).

You ask: Why BMW doesn't just buy the ECU manufacturer?

Well... the company that was selling the ECU to BMW, is BIGGER than BMW. Even if BMW sold 100% of its assets and stock, it wouldn't have enough money to buy the ECU manufacturer.

[Gigachad]

The talent might not exist. Software development has been seen as the preferable career over electrical engineering for a long time now.

[ohthatsnotright]

When I started my career I had a very keen interest in the embedded space, but when it pays half of what CRUD webapps pay I quickly changed to software only. I still tinker with embedded on the side and maybe at some point I can justify the cut in pay to go back to something I'd prefer to work on.

[lmm]

They don't have a culture that values it, at any level. Historically hardware was important and software was a nice-to-have addon cost center. That's the mentality that the people at the top are still in, and it trickles down.

[Mashimo]

> a smaller automative microcontroller company and bring it in-house?

I think in a lot of cases that would be Bosch, which is huge.

[raxxorraxor]

They did the opposite for decades in the hope to save some bucks, they outsourced everything so only business people remained.

Worse this really grew into a culture of entitlement where only a ready to use product is acceptable. There is no R&D anymore, there are people looking to buy solutions that don't exist for car makers.