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Comment by nfriedly | Hacker News Reader

I really like the German system where employees get representation (usually union reps) on the board of the company - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany - I think it helps bring a lot more balance to business decisions.

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I worked in Germany for a while and one of such unions was built at my company. I can't think of a single good thing they did and I remember plenty of ways they made the life of employees worse in ways that looked deliberate. The way the union/council was built looked very bad to me to the point where I completely stopped following the office politics.

I'm not saying this is a bad idea and I certainly don't have enough knowledge of the German system to have an objective assessment, but this looks like another example where the law is produced with good intentions but the implementations of such rules are serving some other purpose.

Other than that, I felt like Germany has incredibly good laws for the workers/employees, the working culture there is very healthy and I like it a lot.

But then at the same time you have something like Volkswagen who just fired their CEO that was pushing hard into EVs. The inertia of the old ICE portion of the company (including the union people who may lose their jobs) just puts a hamper on their speed of execution which shouldn't be the case since incentives are generally aligned. If the company succeeds then the employees + union succeed as well. In this case it seems like they want to hold on to the old way of doing things as long as they can but I don't know what their game plan is going to be once reality comes knocking?

It makes me wonder, can unionized shops survive when some fast moving competitors(eg. Tesla) are not unionized?

Tesla isn't exactly a fast-moving competitor. Musk has been saying full self-driving is coming "any day now" for at least six years and counting¹, but Tesla's own lawyers say it's still largely vaporware². Meanwhile, other EV manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz are handily outpacing Tesla in both functionality³ and legal responsibility⁴ toward the driver. Consumer Reports rated Cadillac's self-driving system higher than Tesla two years ago now.⁵ I'd say Tesla's the one dragging their feet here.

[1]: For more on Musk's SAE level 5 timeline predictions, see https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/05/tesla-autopilot-directo...

[2]: Tesla says full-self driving is "failure, not fraud" https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-08/tesla-laws...

[3]: Mercedes-Benz claims their driving pilot system is already SAE level 3: https://gizmodo.com/mercedes-benz-tesla-autonomous-driving-d...

[4]: Mercedes-Benz is so confident about this in fact that they're even willing to accept legal liability for accidents while their system is active: https://insideevs.com/news/575160/mercedes-accepts-legal-res...

[5]: Consumer Reports compares FSD systems: https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/cadillac-super-cr...

You spent your whole comment focusing on their self driving claims while ignoring the rest of the company.

If you look at how fast they are updating the internals of the cars, you'd see what I was talking about. Their engineering feedback loop is astounding. Things such as moving towards partial castings -> structural pack -> two piece castings etc. within 1.5 years is breakneck speed.

Simplifying the cooling loop design by using a software defined octovalve to eliminate a complete cooling loop in the system is a result of multiple divisions cross collaborating and integrating fast to try a new methodology. Instead of departments fighting with each other to protect their turf(and the end product ultimately suffering), they are breaking down barriers.

The VW ID4 has numerous complaints about their software and reliability. One example I know is that their battery casing is done by an external supplier and the extra mass hurts them in effective range. This is not the mentality that a fast moving company operates on. You bring up mercedes benz but they had to cancel their EQC EV because after so many delays it could not be competitive anymore so instead of launching it they just canceled it. This is after years of it being touted as a Tesla killer. I saw this car years ago at the NY auto show and after years of waiting it amounted to nothing.

[1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34696613

  You spent your whole comment focusing on their self driving claims while
  ignoring the rest of the company.

The rest of the company? You mean the senior management that lord elno raided in an attempt to prop up Twitter?

  The VW ID4 has numerous complaints about their software and reliability.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/software-update-bric...

https://old.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/1033by2/warnin...

That's some impressive software.

Clearly you are not going to be convinced because you came into this conversation with a conclusion and backtracked from that just like the other poster. That is a common problem when discussing both Tesla and Apple. Both companies evoke a lot of emotion and "foaming at the mouth" type responses. Both companies have continued track records of producing stellar engineering.

But for anyone else reading this try to separate your emotion for "lord elno" and just let the engineering speak for itself.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1kHsd3Ocxc

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P-UilAalvE

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXpfU6I_T3w

  just let the engineering speak for itself

Is that a reference to the roofs flying off? Or the bumpers falling off? Or the wiper controls that were ruled illegal in Germany? Or the premature motor failures? Maybe the steering wheels that keep falling off?

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/5/21502379/tesla-modely-roo...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/other/tesla-steering-wheels-...

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/bumper-falls-off-in-...

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1101153_two-thirds-of-e...

https://electrek.co/2020/08/04/tesla-wiper-controls-ruled-il...

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1098389_tesla-model-s-d...

  But for anyone else reading this try to separate your emotion

If you'd like to separate your emotion, well, how about the fact that lord elno gutted senior management and is spending most of his time these days babysitting Twitter? Tesla is fast becoming a rudderless entity. They're not well positioned to respond quickly to anything.

Honeycomb did something similar, voluntarily. Paul Osman, the employee serving on the board, posted about the experience: https://paulosman.me/2022/10/17/being-on-a-board/

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