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Europe's carmakers fret over China's EV prowess at Munich car show
(www.reuters.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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I worked in a big German car maker's EV division. The waste of resources put in to not actually developing a good electric vehicle was staggering.
I was part of a 100 person team who was responsible for one cog of a data ingestion pipeline which read in analytics data from each EV car. It was already about 2 years' in when I joined and it was a total failure. Why the fuck they were spending so much money on something so inconsequential to making a car was initially frustrating; now I think it's just sad.
The reality is that the leadership didn't really care. The brands are so strong that they can afford to move slowly on this. There is also a gravy train going on where money is being pumped into these projects and middle leadership are happy to sit back, do nothing, and still earn free $$$ rather than develop good tech.
Here's one of the stories from my experience (software development perspective): https://www.srcbeat.com/2023/08/sbt/
I really don't think they are strong. The car industry was basically ravaged by the 2007 financial crisis and a lot of what were companies back then are just brands owned by a few of the industry players. It's hard to believe they would survive another situation like that. I think they want to move fast, but they simply aren't able to do so.
From Audi 2022 fiscal year:
The brand is strong relative to Chinese competitors but I don't think it will stay this way forever.
They want to move as fast as they can maintain their profits. I think major shareholders would ideally like to see more tangible results from their R&D division. But it was clear at the time that it didn't matter enough for real action. Middle management I interacted with were actively hostile to me when I spoke about, for example, making source code visible between teams. There was constant calculated behaviour to keep things the way they were and delay completion to maintain funding.