Jul 14
Michelangelo's 'David'

Tesla: The Public as Crash Test Dummies

By Automotive, Telematics 3 Comments

The recent fatal collision involving a Tesla car while in Autopilot self-driving mode, followed by another major crash a week later, and multiple less dramatic rear-end collisions, are calling attention not only to the state of autonomous-driving technology itself but also to the public perception and trust in self-driving cars.

Developing autonomous driving capabilities that are safe under most conditions is proving to be as difficult and time consuming as some have predicted. Most manufacturers are taking a conventional path, adding driver-assistance features gradually and building toward full or near-full autonomy that they expect to mature by the end of this decade. But Tesla, famous for its willingness to challenge the status quo and take business and technology risks, has chosen a much faster, if riskier, route.
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Jul 06
Garden of Earthly Delights Hieronymus Bosch

Agile vs. Corporate Culture

By IT Strategy, PLM 3 Comments

Agile Software Development

Those of you who practice Agile software development will surely recognize the viewpoints expressed in the following quotations:

“Particularly alarming is the seemingly unavoidable fallibility of large software, since a malfunction in an advanced hardware-software system can be a matter of life and death.”

“In design you have to start at the level of organization of programs and machines, with the design of hardware and software together.”

“Begin with skeletal coding: Rather than aiming at finished code, the 46 first coding steps should be aimed at exploring interfaces, sizes of critical modules, complexity, and adequacy of the modules … Some critical items should be checked out, preferably on the hardware if it is available.”

You may be surprised to learn that these are not brought to you from a recent Agile conference or even from the Agile Manifesto circa 2001. These comments are from a NATO software engineering conference that was held in Germany in 1968!
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Jul 04
The Persistence of Memory

Tesla Missed Forecast. Are you Surprised?

By Automotive, Manufacturing No Comments

Tesla Missed Q2 Forecast

Tesla Motors delivered 14,370 vehicles in the second quarter, missing its forecast of 17,000 units “due to the extreme production ramp in Q2 and the high mix of customer-ordered vehicles still on trucks and ships at the end of the quarter, Tesla Q2 deliveries were lower than anticipated at 14,370 vehicles, consisting of 9,745 Model S and 4,625 Model X.”

This should not come as a surprise. One of Tesla’s biggest—albeit least discussed—challenges is its struggling manufacturing supply chain.
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Jun 30
Mosquitodance

Why Do Software Bugs Continue to Plague Products?

By Automotive, PLM 5 Comments

Pesky Software Problems Plague Many Products

It seems not a day goes by without reading about yet another software bug that inflicted a catastrophic (or, at times, just ridiculous) malfunction on an everyday product.

In these conversations about software quality problems, the auto industry is often singled out. Indeed, consumer complaints about vehicle software systems have been growing steadily over the past several years, and numerous automakers, including Volvo, Nissan, and Volkswagen, have  initiated large  recall campaigns to remedy software defects. Even Tesla, that usually gets immediate praises for almost everything it does, isn’t immune from releasing faulty software controlled systems (although Tesla does a superior job in fixing software defects via over-the-air updates).

But not only cars suffer from software malaise. General Electric’s refrigerators, too, require software updates to remedy errors that hamper the appliance’s most basic operations, and Samsung’s connected fridge allows hackers to steal a consumer’s Gmail login information.
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