Ex-Apple VP Mike Abbott Joins General Motors as Exec Vice President, Software

> "lost data connection to the engine"

I've been commenting on this for a while, the current cars are extremely fragile electrically given how everything is interconnected. I had a tail light go out in a BMW, a repair that should cost maybe $1 for a new bulb or in the worst case a few more dollars in new wire. On the BMW? A $1000+ proprietary control module plus access to multi-tens-of-thousands dollars of BMW factory diagnostic equipment to "pair" the new bulb with the new controller. This is all insane if viewed objectively.

The worst part is not the cost, although that stings. A few decades down the road, where is this proprietary bulb control module going to come from? It won't be available from anywhere at any cost.

I get that it's cool to see a new car with all the gadgetry but we should really be thinking longer term here. The lifetime of a car is many decades. The lifetime of electronic gadgetry is a few years, maybe a decade tops. It is perfectly reasonable to daily drive a car from the 80s, but imagine continuing to doing real work on a computer from the 80s today? The lifetimes of cars and electronics are too vastly different, they need to be decoupled.

I confidently predict that a century from now there will still be collectors driving classic cars from the 90s and before, but there will be nearly no cars from the 2020s that remain operational.

I'm sure car manufacturers aren't too unhappy to create a world where everyone throws away their car as often as they throw away their phone, but let's consider the enviromental disaster of this waste.

I'm a newgrad, would you mind giving me a rough overview estimate of a full career's comp growth (excluding outliers like HFT)?

What I'm seeing in my cohort is newgrad offers ranging from $100k-$300k/year (FB rockstar return intern offer), with an expected promotion/jobhop to mid level dev in 2 years and then senior in another 2-3 (assuming you do well). What happens after that?

This sort of thing is not limited to Chevy/GM. The new 2023 BMW i7 (starting price ~$120K, fully loaded ~$160K) comes with options for a massive fold-down widescreen cinema in the back seat, and the back seat can turn into a recliner for the ultimate movie experience (I am paraphrasing)[1][2]. My daughter looked at a couple of reviews and said something along the lines of "it's like they thought of every amazing thing they could put in a car, and then went and did all of them". And indeed, the video reviews look very impressive. Then I saw the one from Car Guide[3] in which he mentions that not only when the cinema screen is down in the back, the driver can't see out of the rear view mirror (obvious when you think about it), but also when the back seat is in recliner mode, it folds the front passenger seat forward, and then the passenger headrest completely obscures the passenger wing mirror, so that the driver then has no idea what's going on around the car.

It's clear how superficially impressive the car is looking at the video and from my daughter's reaction (she's a teenager, but I don't think being impressed by this stuff is limited to teenagers, and I confess to a "wow!" moment myself when watching the same video). But the car is failing at its basic functionality: being a car that's safe to drive. Like BMW or not, I don't think this sort of stuff would have happened in the past. It feels like they have lost their way.

From my own perspective, I really dislike the touch-sensitive user interfaces in new cars. Anything that distracts me from looking at the road is bad, and there is really no tactile element to these interfaces (when I rented a Jeep recently, I found myself having to examine the touchscreen when stopped at red lights to learn where the various controls were - granted this can happen in any car, where you have to learn where things are, but at least there aren't usually multiple nested levels of menus - but still having to at least glance at the screen to see where to put my finger, whereas in older cars once you learn where things are you can locate controls by touch and activate them without having to take your eyes off the road).

[1] Review from The Verge with pics of the screen https://www.theverge.com/23686915/bmw-i7-xdrive60-review-pho...

[2] Video review showing all the crazy features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwQvZaqpwDk

[3] Car Guide video review, link to discussion of screen and mirror issues: https://youtu.be/VsvrQSpl-5U?t=497

> who here doesn't want infotainment software in their car?

I definitely do not want the car to embed any infotainment. It's the wrong place for it.

Any infotainment built into the car is going to be obsolete before you drive out the dealer lot, and laughably so ten years later. But the lifetime of the car itself is many decades. It makes zero sense to join the two.

The car should excel and being a car and I will use a phone or tablet for the infotainment part (which I do anyway, even if the car has some).

BMW lost its way when it made an SUV, at the turn of the last century.

Then horrible things like front wheel drive happened in 2004!

Then more odd numbers! 2, 4, 6…!

And then they put a turbo on the M3.

Absolute carnage after 1999 lol