
Car giants need to move fast and break things - prostoalex
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/04/23/the-worlds-car-giants-need-to-move-fast-and-break-things
======
ehnto
I don't have industry insight, so this is just my view as an opinionated
consumer on specifically new car sales:

Everyday consumer cars haven't offered anything interesting to the consumer
for nearly 20 years, and I'm not sure what they could possibly offer. For the
longest time the branding drive for cars has been about new technology,
signaling success and personal branding. But I see a few shifts in society
that make these less important:

1\. New Technology is fun, but it's reached a peak of usefulness to the
consumer in cars. For the vast majority of people, a car is a utility, and
their basic usefulness isn't improving anymore. If you find your near new car
isn't meeting your needs, it's a different model, not a new version that you
want.

2\. I wonder if the personal image of car ownership isn't being diminished. An
awful lot of money to spend on something you don't do much with. For many it's
just been assumed that you need a car and that it'll be expensive, so you'll
get it financed, which hides the real cost of the car inside weekly expenses.
I see that changing, not least because the middle class has less money than
they used to.

Just like inflated housing costs, the only reason we've been stomaching the
cost of new cars is thanks to easy finance. When you live paycheck to
paycheck, it's easy to mask the costs. But when people are getting squeezed,
not even that works.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Everyday consumer cars haven't offered anything interesting to the consumer
> for nearly 20 years, and I'm not sure what they could possibly offer.

If you look back to the days when cars were less utilitarian and more
sentimental, the key difference was that people would modify them. They'd put
on bigger wheels and performance parts, cut them up and turn a truck into a
camper or add aftermarket features to the interior.

You ever see that show about Count's Customs? People used to do that at home.
But basically every car on that show is 1980s or earlier for a reason.

Modern cars are unibody, they don't have a separate frame so you can't put on
a different one. Everything is not only done by computers but done by opaque
undocumented non-standard computers. You can't so much as replace the
entertainment system in your car because it's integrated with the climate
controls and everything else.

Some of that (like unibody) is for a reason, but most of it isn't. It doesn't
have to be this way.

And when it wasn't was when people actually cared about their cars. That's how
you get people to pay you all of these maintenance dollars -- get them to push
their cars hard on the track or off-roading or on cross-country road trips but
then care enough about them to pay you the money to repair them when they wear
out. Get people to love them because they have hundreds of hours into them and
brand loyalty means something because all your spare parts and systems
knowledge are for Chevys and not Hondas or vice versa.

They all think they want to be Apple but more phones run Android and more
servers run Linux and Tesla is already being Apple. Be something else. There
are a lot of customers looking for something else and not a lot of competitors
providing it.

~~~
nickik
You really can't get around the Unibody when producing more then 50-80k cars.

Trucks of course are the exception as you have to go with body-on-frame and in
that case we do see a much larger modding community and a huge after market.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Right, but why aren't they publishing RFCs for the APIs their different
computers use to talk to each other, and releasing most of their code under a
license that says something like "modify or distribute this code however you
want and use it on any vehicle you have a license for (which all of ours come
with)"?

There should be third party forks of your entertainment system on github or
you're doing it wrong.

~~~
ironman1478
There are a ton of trade secrets in the interesting parts of a car (ECUs) that
will basically never be released. But for infotainment, there are competing
efforts to standardize on that front but it's slow from what I've observed.
Decisions about components + software are made way in advance of the car being
made, so softwarey type things are outdated by the time they come out. That is
changing though

~~~
AnthonyMouse
The trade secret argument is silly. As if it really matters if it takes your
competitors a month to reverse engineer it from disassembling a binary instead
of a week if you publish the source code. You can't mass produce something
with a secret in it and expect it to stay a secret.

> Decisions about components + software are made way in advance of the car
> being made, so softwarey type things are outdated by the time they come out.

They're doing this wrong.

You have an infotainment system which is basically a PC/tablet built into the
dash. It should be completely open. Like you should be able to rip it out and
replace it with an actual PC or tablet running entirely third party software
and it should still be able to do everything.

Then it should talk to all the other parts of the car over ethernet using
published standards, no secret APIs. Not publishing the code for the ECU is
silly but that allows them to do it and not have that infect everything else
in the car, because its internals can be a black box but all the public
interfaces aren't.

Then it doesn't matter how outdated your infotainment system is because
anybody can install the latest version after the fact or replace it with an
entirely third party one and all you need is a "driver" that translates the
API version used by the ECU and other vehicle components into something that
infotainment system can work with.

~~~
ironman1478
You actually can mass produce tons of stuff with trade secrets! A lot of
systems aren't easy to access and wouldn't necessarily be debuggable with
normal tools, depending on th age of the car. For new cars, they are work on
basically building devices with no interface except the communication channel,
and to access it you'd have to reverse engineer the protocol, which is not
trivial I can assure you.

For infotainment, its not actually as easy as you think. Its definitely rated
QM or maybe ASIL-A because it can do things like control climate or on some
cars put it into different modes. Failures in these systems might not be
catastrophic, but they need to be correct to some degree and failure or poor
design, can lead to this

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-r...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-
remotely-kill-jeep-highway/amp)

Granted, should they have connected everything the way they did? No, but car
companies are barely engineering firms, they are just basically assembly firms
that contract out all their components except for things like the ECUs. If
they don't know how to specify security requirements to a vendor, it won't
happen. They are learning though and it takes time.

------
BizyDev
Move fast and break things like Boeing tried and failed with the 737 Max ?

That's the danger with software companies being the wealthiest ones in the
world, people think that others companies should apply the same recipes and
earn more money.

You can move fast with web and mobile apps, if you break something a page
didn't load and someone is unable to see number of likes on his last Instagram
pic of his dinner, fine, let's redeploy and it should work again.

Even Azure or AWS provide something like 99.99% SLA on their services, imagine
if Boeing/Airbus/BMW/Mercedes/etc. had the same level on their products, we
would have dozens of airplane crashes per day... (Okay maybe not now during
the lockdown).

This culture can't and shouldn't be applied in other domains.

------
simon_000666
This is the stupidest advice i’ve read in a long time. The economist should be
embarrassed by this. When Facebook moves fast and break things the worst case
is that a webpage doesn’t load. When you are mass producing a vehicle the
worst case is that people die. Potentially a lot of people, people who may not
even be driving the vehicle. So no, auto makers should absolutely not move
fast and break things, unless they want to completely lose any consumer
confidence in their product and be on the receiving end of potentially
crippling law suits.

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egypturnash
I cannot help but feel like "move fast and break things" is the last thing we
should be advocating companies that make multi-ton metal objects that hurtle
themselves around at speeds more than sufficient to kill anyone they run into,
and/or the people within them, should be doing.

~~~
nickik
SpaceX is doing it with rockets. So ...

~~~
TeMPOraL
SpaceX's "move fast and break things" is entirely unlike the software
industry's approach. It's grounded in owning the whole vertical, understanding
what's going on at each place in rocket's construction, and relaxing some
safety margins _relative to aerospace standards_. They can do that, because
their rockets are unmanned, so they can make them work both as launch vehicles
and experimental vehicles at the same time. You'll note, however, that they
are _not_ careless about range safety, i.e. ensuring the rocket failure at any
stage in its mission doesn't hurt people.

------
millstone
> implore the chancellor to revive a “cash-for-clunkers” scheme like the one
> introduced after the financial crisis.

A modified "Cash for Clunkers" revival sounds pretty smart. My family's
driving has plummeted, and now we have an extra car which we never drive.
Meanwhile there's (I presume?) increased interest in the car-based gig
economy. If someone were to want my 18 year old rust bucket (runs great!), I'd
off it for cheap, since the insurance, registration, and its physical form are
all deadweight. Then I'd buy a new car once the economy begins to recover. Why
not make this dynamic part of the automaker bailout?

~~~
Libeste
The car based gig economy doesn't want your 18 year old rust bucket either.
The cutoff tends to be closer to 10 years old or newer.

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nimbius
speaking as a technician for a midwestern chain of diesel truck shops, nooooo
they do not.

>Most carmakers were fitter going into this crisis than the last recession a
decade ago.

The article fails to mention that as a term for accepting loans during the
last "once in a lifetime" financial crisis, automakers were held by the scruff
of their neck and forced to eat their spinach. Pontiac was shuttered because
politicians fondly remembered Buick and the Aztek was a design that pissed off
basically anyone over 30. Fiat bought Chrysler, and the same mid level
managers who were chortling over the theft of the E-Class design during the
ripoff partnership with Mercedes were now finishing cafeteria crow pie and
packing their desks.

>Credit Suisse, a bank, expects GM and Ford to burn through $10bn and $14bn of
cash

Someone needs to check the ford offices for a gas leak, because they brought
this entirely on themselves by wiping out automobiles in favour of SUV's and
muscle cars. They turned the 'Stang into an electric crossover and got rid of
the focus ST to be replaced with the ecosport, the most sterile compromise
since Obamacare. Meanwhile GM is stuck trying to figure out what to do with
Buick, a car thats remained the automotive equivalent of a knock-off rolex for
over forty years. by comparison, Ford dropped their mercury brand in 2011 and
so are spared the absolute nightmare of marketing this car without a buyer.

Americans --the majority of them-- want cheap cars that are inexpensive to
maintain and reliable to own. full stop. Capitalism says otherwise and auto
loans are a 1.1 trillion dollar bubble, with an average lending period of six
years. Im frankly shocked no one is talking about an impending collapse of
auto lending.

~~~
manigandham
There has been plenty of discussion about the auto lending market, it's just
overshadowed by far bigger recent problems like housing and unemployment
amongst a pandemic.

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makach
Wouldn't that go against their mission?

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lihaciudaniel
[https://outline.com/ygSGPU](https://outline.com/ygSGPU)

