Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

Source: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=38... (Pages 62 through 68)

Left as a reference, citation. Mods: Wouldn't suggest changing to this URL, UX is pretty ick, easier to read the Twitter screenshots.

Well, that was a butter clenching read. It’s not hard to understand why their chip designers bailed as soon as possible, and they seemed to perpetually bleed technical talent. Is this a matter of incompetence or the usual anything-to-win “move fast and break things” approach?

The latter fits better with their marketing vs. reality gap on “autopilot” and subsequent crashes.

Any way to know those posts are not just the fantasy of a troll?

Why is this interesting or surprising? Of course almost all challengers have hacky tech under the hood because they don't have the resources. Winning from that position is possible not because of generally better tech but by delivering something that the incumbents don't.

Remember the demo of the first iPhone (vs the huge expertise of Nokia). Or how Microsoft won the desktop starting from a single user, cooperative multitasking system (vs all the sophisticated Unix-based systems). Or Facebook running on despised MySQL and PHP.

These hacks are part of the strategy. It's risky but probably doing these 'properly' would increase the risk even more.

Re QA: To quote Dodge (via Deming), "You can not inspect quality into a product."

This poster seems to think well of the QA team they had. However,

It doesn't matter how great your QA team is, if the quality isn't in the system the QA team can't put it there. All they can do is tell you that you're making poor quality products, and attempt to inform management (as QA rarely has real authority) who should then act on that and work to improve the system. If quality isn't part of the corporate ethos, then they (QA) will make little difference in the end.