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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

The underlying cause of both companies' issues is the same, and it's not organizational size and style. It's complexity. Bugs and edge cases grow exponentially, not linearly, with complexity, and both Tesla's cars and the 737 MAX are far more complex than previous products.

It's similar to the "featureitis" that causes complex software products and platforms to crumble and die over time. Part of why we keep rewriting the universe in software is the need to repeatedly start over to escape a mountain of accreted complexity in some old system. At some point the cost of rewriting the parts we need is lower than the cost of just maintaining the bloat.

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Tesla's cars are a heck of a lot less complex than normal ICE vehicles considering that they lack a transmission and emissions system.

Edit: Fanboys, this isn't an insult, it's a statement of fact. An EV simply doesn't have all the additional mechanical, electrical and software complexity that comes with those systems.

They make it up with their level of electronics, sensors, software, battery technology etc.

But they don't have to add all that electronic hoohah and then construct it in a way that fails!

Come on, a car that stops when syslog has exhausted available storage! A car with continuous touchscreen failures in 2019! My GPS was bought in 2008, it has a touchscreen and it spent all its life inside a car, and it is still working, despite GPS rollover!

It's troubling that Tesla repeats mistakes that everyone else knows to avoid.

They’re mechanically less complex, but all of the complexity in a modern automobile is in the sensors and control systems. It’s the same with modern airplanes; they’re not mechanically much more complex than they were 40 years ago, but they have sophisticated fly by wire systems that didn’t exist back then.

Yes, and an EV is lacking two massive groups of those systems because it doesn't have the mechanical systems those electronics control.

Edit: Why is this being down-voted? Is it factually incorrect or does it make people uncomfortable?

To the higher parent comment's point, the trade-off may not have been an equal one.

Yes, they have two less major mechanical systems. But they likely have more electronic and software systems, which tend to have more failure modes (and be more difficult to test) than their mechanical counterparts.

Back when I worked in automotive assembly, we'd did some work replacing mechanical systems with electronic controls. To a large extent, the mechanical systems, once tuned, would run indefinitely until they developed some mechanical wear. The electronic counterparts had to be re-tuned on a regular basis. The electronic ones had less moving parts, but increased complexity.

The 737MAX is not fly-by-wire.

The problem is the automatic trim control system that was hacked on to make up for the design being fundamentally flawed (having engines too large for the obsolete airframe).

Indeed! In some ways it's a giant smartphone with a big battery and some motors added on. Considering the amount of controls, sensors, and continuous optimization for efficiency and emissions on ICE vehicles, especially when do many of them are from different vendors on pretty old standards/busses, I'd take a modern EV any day. Way simpler.

You may be right in that regard, but I would argue that Tesla is bringing a new variable into the equation which is autopilot software. I'm no expert at mechanical engineering but knowing how every major car manufacturer has mastered their transmission and emission systems, and how none of them have a reasonably full-featured autopilot solution, it does look like that variable is (far?) more complex.

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