[AlotOfReading]

Pretty much every major manufacturer has a bay area satellite office these days. Toyota has a research center in San Ramon and a woven office near the broadcom campus in Palo Alto. GM has an office in SOMA and in mountain view. Ford has an office literally a block away from Tesla HQ. Mercedes used to be near Cariad at moffet field, but now they're down by SJC. Nissan is in Santa Clara.

Need I continue? And Tesla is generally understood to pay on the lower end among those companies.

[nswest23]

then why is it that their software is a generation ahead?

[AlotOfReading]

Leaving aside any quibbles about the quality of Tesla's offering, look up the story of CARIAD [0]. The scale and cultural inertia of OEMs is hard to overstate. That change can't happen quickly.

Toyota had the better idea, keep the software folks an independent business unit with internal competency/ownership, and only allow them to fix future platforms. Woven is apparently having great success inside Toyota. The side effect is that those changes still aren't apparent even years later.

GM had the same idea, but killed it recently.

[0] https://www.germanautopreneur.com/p/cariad-volkswagen-softwa...

[iosguyryan]

The Rivian R2 makes Tesla’s look old and Android like. It’s very slick. The only thing I miss vs CarPlay is the voice Apple Maps uses, which is more natural.