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Comment by rawland | Hacker News Reader

This article smeels like PR to me. Especially as Porsche, Audi and VW are basically the same company [0] and struggling to sell their EVs.

Tesla is the dominating force. Some numbers from Norway:

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/08/16/tesla-model-3-12-4-of-a...

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group#Subsidiaries_...

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Volkswagen Group is the biggest car company in the world at the moment, with Toyota a close second. Volkswagen owns 12 automotive brands. Pretty soon they'll also be the biggest electric car company in the world, purely because they're spending the most money on it:

https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/vws-91b-spend-evs-out...

They'll release multiple EVs across multiple brands every year from now on. Volkswagen's MEB platform is going to allow them to produce cars with equivalent range to Tesla's at a lower price point. Volkswagen says their battery cost is now below $100 per kilowatt hour:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/08/business/volkswagen-trade...

That's the advantage of the economies of scale Volkswagen will be able to achieve with MEB, both from in-house production and from licensing the platform to other manufacturers from small manufacturers like e.Go to large manufacturers like Ford.

But still: a VW (or for that matter any other car than a Tesla) will not have one thing that makes Tesla unique: software. Even discarding the fact that Tesla has probably the most data worldwide to train self-driving AI and way more experience in building fully-electric cars, no one comes remotely close to what Tesla can do. Modern non-Tesla still are sold with "map updates" ffs, and something like "remote software update" is totally unheard of.

Tesla's strength is software and extreme agility in software development. The other car manufacturers are prevented by their sheer size and corporate infighting culture to catch up and they will be for years to come.

> a VW will not have one thing that makes Tesla unique: software

The ID.3 is supposed to have a large augmented reality heads up display which can do things like overlay sat nav indicators on the view of the road ahead. It sounds interesting. That's something I want to see more detail of at the official launch.

Volkswagen has a partnership with Ford and has invested $2.6 billion in Argo: https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/vw-investment-vaults-...

Volkswagen is doing other things like joining Automotive Grade Linux: https://www.automotivelinux.org/announcements/2019/04/08/vol...

They're investing big in all aspects of electric cars. I think they're across the issues.

Call me back when they have four years of proven track record to properly maintain a decent software stack including over-the-air updates... I won't buy a car which needs to be driven to a service or worse to an authorized dealership for a software upgrade.

I'd counter argue that it's maybe not that bad to have proven, formally validated software in the field, which is what traditional software developers in the automotive sectors did for decades. You tend to push out less crap if you are forced to make sure it works well from the start due to lack of updates.

At least the German Automotive industry relies very much on formal verification and model driven development for this reason.

The firmware for the components that drive the car is one thing and I agree with you there (though still, OTA capability should be a must-have).

The software of the driver-facing stuff however is a different game and honestly there is so much utter crap out there it hurts - badly (if at all) tested phone integrations, no touch UI at all, maps which my four year old phone can render more fluently...

Except the UI stuff they push out is utter crap. It's slowly improving, but I if I understand the industry correctly the efforts that are leading to that started many years ago.

Meanwhile when Tesla releases a bug they can ship a fix within days.

Why arbitrarily limit your development like that? To make some money off your customer being forced to go to the dealer to get an update? That's just terrible UX.

I expect the VW group to scale back their ambitious plans. I hope not, but I expect it based on extremely poor etron sales.

Competing against the Tesla Model Y in 2019 should be extremely simple since the Y isn't available yet. Given that Audi only planned on making 45,000 etrons in 2019 and the lack of a strong competitor you'd expect huge waiting lists for the etron. Yesterday I checked availability in Canada and there are 115 etrons sitting on dealer lots in Canada.

Committing to selling 3 million per year in a few years is a huge gamble if you can't sell 45,000 in 2019...

The MEB based cars will be better sellers than the current Audi e-tron Quattro. The ID.3 is like a better e-Golf (it will replace it) and they sold over 100,000 e-Golfs in total. I don't think they'll be scaling back.

The first MEB based Audi will be the Audi e-tron Q4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiwevzHsCbU

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