IMHO, these stories aren’t unexpected from a tech company that grows 80% year over year, developing and expanding as fast as technology and market forces allow. Yes, there are mistakes and unfortunate incidents in the organization of people and tech priorities here, but this is inevitable in an engineering org that moves this fast. You really need to measure this up against Tesla’s achievements:
Growing high double digits each year for more than a decade in a brutally competitve space, developed 4 hugely successful vehicles, first US auto company to succeed (knock on wood) or grow to significant size (>700,000 cars sold) since Ford, production constrained continuously, did this with almost zero paid marketing, built global networks of dealers, service and chargers, improved the state of battery tech by a multiple and doubled global li-ion battery pack output, built 3 car factories, made electric cars economically viable, incidentally seriously wounded the car dealership model, succeeded with qualitatively different software approach with OTA updates and tight software integration, designed cars with hitherto unparalleled performance in their class, and others that I couldn’t come up with on the spot.
This is only controversial because this is safety-critical tech and it’s uncomfortable to see the development pains of consumer grade software affect it. There’s no evidence that the approach have led to more injuries or deaths than cars do in general, quite the opposite. Tesla cars are safer than competition, the argument can be made that fast deployment is a net win regarding safety. Even in the absence of any other things they have achieved.
I believe there’s also an element of envy, or misunderstood beliefs that the best tech approach is taking things slowly. Yes, in isolation. But then market forces will crush you because someone else was faster, or because you missed the window of opportunity for making things so dramatically better that you manage to unbalance the local maximum of the status quo.
[Edit: To everyone who downvotes this: For the sake of enlightening discussion, could you please express your disagreement in words rather than the downvote button? Note that I'm talking about GP's linked commentary on Tesla's engineering mishaps in general, not this specific vulnerability].
Growing high double digits each year for more than a decade in a brutally competitve space, developed 4 hugely successful vehicles, first US auto company to succeed (knock on wood) or grow to significant size (>700,000 cars sold) since Ford, production constrained continuously, did this with almost zero paid marketing, built global networks of dealers, service and chargers, improved the state of battery tech by a multiple and doubled global li-ion battery pack output, built 3 car factories, made electric cars economically viable, incidentally seriously wounded the car dealership model, succeeded with qualitatively different software approach with OTA updates and tight software integration, designed cars with hitherto unparalleled performance in their class, and others that I couldn’t come up with on the spot.
This is only controversial because this is safety-critical tech and it’s uncomfortable to see the development pains of consumer grade software affect it. There’s no evidence that the approach have led to more injuries or deaths than cars do in general, quite the opposite. Tesla cars are safer than competition, the argument can be made that fast deployment is a net win regarding safety. Even in the absence of any other things they have achieved.
I believe there’s also an element of envy, or misunderstood beliefs that the best tech approach is taking things slowly. Yes, in isolation. But then market forces will crush you because someone else was faster, or because you missed the window of opportunity for making things so dramatically better that you manage to unbalance the local maximum of the status quo.
[Edit: To everyone who downvotes this: For the sake of enlightening discussion, could you please express your disagreement in words rather than the downvote button? Note that I'm talking about GP's linked commentary on Tesla's engineering mishaps in general, not this specific vulnerability].