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Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

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Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#191

Post by csours »

optimiz3 wrote: post #150
csours wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small company risk is failure to grow. Big company risk is every other failure. Tesla is valued as a growth/tech company. As long as people believe in their growth, they get more cash. I don't personally understand how Tesla hasn't had more problems with their apparently uncontrolled engineering changes. At least part of it is customer enthusiasm for the product papering over any drawbacks. It's not that GM can't mak…

Tesla is past the cash raising phase though - they are massively profitable and actively retiring debt early. https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/0000... "On July 16, 2021, we issued a notice of redemption to the holders of the 2025 Notes informing the holders that we will redeem the notes in full in August 2021 at a redemption price equal to 102.65% of outstanding principal amount, plus accrued a…

They are raising money by selling stock.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#192

Post by panick21 »

syntaxing wrote: post #120
mwint wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally, what is it that prevents the established auto makers from making changes mid lifecycle? Seems like Tesla keeps pulling it off; why can’t GM? Is it that the component specification+acquisition cycle you describe is optimized to take as long as the development cycle of a new car?

Disclaimer: I work and worked for subsidiaries of big automakers but this opinion is of my own. I would guess it’s a mixture of culture, cost, and scale. Culture wise, Tesla is extremely vertically integrated so that gives them a lot more breathing room. Cost wise, Tesla pretty much still sells car at a loss and relies heavily on carbon offset subsidies for income. When your revenue is established, trying to change m…

> Cost wise, Tesla pretty much still sells car at a loss and relies heavily on carbon offset subsidies for income.

I'm sorry but that is just straight up complete nonsense. Like seriously, you are directly disagreeing with public financial statements. We know exactly how much margin Tesla has, with and without carbon offset.

The simple fact is, Tesla has leading automotive margins even when you exclude any carbon credits.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#193

Post by [deleted] »

delfinom wrote: post #117
tremon wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always interpreted the "10K global variables" to mean 10K directly accessible, heap-allocated symbols. It's a code reek. If you use a configuration object or other abstraction, the number of accessible variables may not change, but their scope and access method does. It's a matter of interpretation I guess, but I would not classify a wrapper object (like .Net's ConfigurationManager singleton) as "10K global variabl…

>I always interpreted the "10K global variables" to mean 10K directly accessible, heap-allocated symbols. It's a code reek. Which to me on an old _accelerator_ design is suspect because that's alot of heap for the micros that would have been used back in the day. This isn't a Linux system. It was at best a micro with like 8KB of RAM. (I'm not actually sure what it is but there's no way it was impressive).

[deleted]

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#195

Post by csours »

snthd wrote: post #133
csours wrote: post #51

Disclaimer up front: I work for GM. I don't work on chips or components for my day job. What follows is solely my own opinion. Some things to emphasize: OEMs (GM, Ford, Toyota, VW, etc) do not design components, and they do not want to. They design specifications for components, and then get suppliers to bid. This is great for efficiency in established ecosystems, not great for agility. To my knowledge, GM did not ca…

>40-60V system What makes that voltage a better trade off?

Other comments pointed out why higher is better. The cap at 60v is somewhat arbitrary, but as others said, higher voltage is harder to switch, and above 60v DC it is easy to kill people.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#196

Post by m0llusk »

Can't is a really strong word. One potential solution that might open some paths to innovation would be to split up the product a bit more. Ship vehicles with extremely basic features only and some of those features intentionally designed to be swapped out in the short term. Use third party suppliers to swap in instrument clusters, engine controllers, and such and allow those to use all the latest chips.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#197

Post by acranox »

snthd wrote: post #133
csours wrote: post #51

Disclaimer up front: I work for GM. I don't work on chips or components for my day job. What follows is solely my own opinion. Some things to emphasize: OEMs (GM, Ford, Toyota, VW, etc) do not design components, and they do not want to. They design specifications for components, and then get suppliers to bid. This is great for efficiency in established ecosystems, not great for agility. To my knowledge, GM did not ca…

>40-60V system What makes that voltage a better trade off?

Another factor I haven't seen mentioned in the responses yet is safety to human bodies. You (or your kid) can stick a wet finger in a 12V DC charger socket in your car and not get an electric shock, including any of the exposed contacts under the hood, including the battery terminals. But once you're up to 40-60V, the risk of electric shock to humans is actually something that needs to be factored in.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#198

Post by pedrocr »

coryrc wrote: post #127
nbernard wrote: post #68

But for the cost, couldn't (for instance) a 16nm fab produce 90nm chips? If not, how complex would it be to "port" an existing 90nm chip, to produce a 16nm revision? Impossible, or quite easy but not cost effective? From the POV of the car companies, could such revisions be used directly, or would they need to be qualified in the same fashion as new parts?

No and about as expensive as having designed it in the first place. Given design costs are the largest portion of per-unit costs it's not a good investment.

Could you explain why not? Naively, having a much more dense process should allow automatic conversion. Going from 90nm to 16nm is 10x the density, that's a lot of margin for an automatic tool to use. Why doesn't that work?

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#199

Post by csours »

sandGorgon wrote: post #176
csours wrote: post #51

Disclaimer up front: I work for GM. I don't work on chips or components for my day job. What follows is solely my own opinion. Some things to emphasize: OEMs (GM, Ford, Toyota, VW, etc) do not design components, and they do not want to. They design specifications for components, and then get suppliers to bid. This is great for efficiency in established ecosystems, not great for agility. To my knowledge, GM did not ca…

> If you were going to design a new car electrical architecture from scratch today, you would have something like a 40-60V system with a centralized controller (or pair of controllers in a safety redundant configuration). Actually this point is something im curious about - it seems to be redundant to have a 3X redundant processor ..probably placed in different places on the car body for safety. Would that not be supe…

Do not take any of this as a particular endorsement of a safety system.

Airplanes need 3x redundancy on safety critical components, because they carry a lot of people and are not fail safe when they are in the air. Cars can generally stop safely.

As far as changing architectures - think about safety critical loops and real time computing. Some processes should never be pre-empted.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#200

Post by roughly »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #131
api wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OEMs (GM, Ford, Toyota, VW, etc) do not design components, and they do not want to. They design specifications for components, and then get suppliers to bid. This is great for efficiency in established ecosystems, not great for agility. There are some great stories about SpaceX trying to source components this way and then finally ending up having to DIY. What they found was that modern CAD and rapid prototyping ma…

I wish company leadership knew that conventional wisdom is time-bound and has an expiration date. Of course, actually trying to figure out if the conventional wisdom still holds involves risking time and money on R&D. And, the larger the institution the more risk averse the leadership will be. It’s a real shame that the companies you would think have the most ability to absorb risk are the most averse towards taking…

It’s not just science that advances one funeral at a time.
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