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Why Silicon Valley Won't Be the Green Car Detroit
thecarchik writes "NPR boldly pronounced, 'The new automobile of the 21st century is likely to benefit from the culture of Silicon Valley, where people are used to taking a chip, a cell or an idea and working on it until it becomes something big.' We've thought about it for a year, and discussed it with many people. And we don't believe it. Silicon Valley is the wrong place to build an auto industry, for three main reasons."
Too many liberals. And I am not even trolling...
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
why would they be expected to build anything else? they'll build the specs and engineer the processes and ship it off to china... business as usual.
Are they kidding? Silicon Valley already doesn't do a lot of it's hardcore manufacturing. Neither does Detroit anymore.
It's a globalized world out there now. There's no good reason that the Valley can't be the R&D center for even conventional cars. Nevermind bleeding edge EV cars. They just might not build them in California.
An electric car would be no different from an iPod in this respect.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Although it makes some concessions to the idea, the article ultimately struggles around the idea that where things are prototyped/engineered isn't necessarily where they will be built.
And I agree, Silicon Valley is a terrible place to build a manufacturing plant. Cost of living is too expensive and you can't reasonably expect to pay factory workers wages that will allow them to compete for housing with programmers and engineers.
However, the article makes an awful case that engineering around green cars can't/won't happen in Silicon Valley. They point out that Tesla has to work to attract the kind of specialized engineers they need to move out there. But you know what? The point is, you can convince them to move out there. It might cost you, but you can do it if it's important enough. Good luck convincing the best and the brightest that they want to live in Detroit instead, despite a much cheaper cost of living.
Like the fine print on Apple and other hi tech company product packaging tells us: Designed in California. Made in [not California].
Regarding the electric cars companies currently in California. Maybe some cars will be built in California while the company is still in a start up and "prototyping" mode (this can be years after starting to sell to early adopters). However when the company matures and the company perspective evolves from development to manufacturing the factories will move out of state. Especially if viable competitors appear.
Silicon Valley may be a hub for design but other parts of the country have far more expertise in nuts-and-bolts manufacturing. The components of a car may be incredibly hi tech but auto manufacturing will largely remain bolting and welding components together.
Slashdot has posted several articles from greencarreports.com (all submitted by thecarchik), many of which have been pretty poor, including the one about cambered tires improving efficiency while completely neglecting the fact that it ruins handling, a study showing that hyrid cars don't save enough gas to cover extra cost by conveniently only looking at the first 5 year of the cars use.
I've added them to my ignored links list.
I would also choose to build cars somewhere else for the following reasons, even not bothering with taxes:
1: Heavy industry is not popular in CA. I'd encounter NIMBY syndrome everywhere I wanted to place a heavy duty factory.
2: Detroit has lots of fresh water. Most of California does not. This is a make or break, because if push came to shove, the spigots would be turned off on the factory's water supply so the golf course down the street can water their lawns.
3: Energy problems. California has brownouts aplenty. I'd either have to have large batteries to make up for the poor power grid there, or move to a place that has more reliable power.
4: Traffic. I would not be able to move cars out to the rest of the nation and the world as readily as if the plant was located in a less populated region.
Where would I put a factory? Michigan and Texas both come to mind. Detroit, Abilene, or San Antonio would be ideal spots. From there, I can get vehicles onto ships, I can get supplies from both coasts easily. Texas also has the advantage of being "open for business" all year around with few days of snow or bad weather.
But I doubt that it will be Detroit. Texas and other states without the UAW controlling the governments will get the majority of new factories.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
These days, it takes $1 billion or more to design, engineer, test, certify, and launch a brand-new vehicle. And that takes roughly five years.
How long do you think it takes to make a missile or satellite ? It's something silicon valley has been doing for year. If you want a more mainstream example, how long do you think it takes to make a cell phone from scratch? It's not just a bunch of desks and a few smart coders. It takes industrial design to go through iterations of the device, radio designers to simulate many iterations, and finally it has to be tested by government(s) and by carriers before the phone is finally able to ship. 2 years for this is considered "speed of light", if you have to redesign late in the process it can stretch out further.
The Kindle took 4 years to develop in secret before it was released, and it's not a very complicated product. There are plenty of businesses in the valley that know that hardware is a long term investment, and that you have to put up a whole lot of capital to make it happen.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The Bay Area is still hugely expensive to live in, by most measures. Not just housing but many other things are expensive and it is in a high tax state/region. So wages tend to be higher here, too. It is not a low cost place to operate a business. Many local high-tech firms find the advantages of being here outweigh the costs, but these companies also typically have large offshore development centers, so a lot of their labor is non-local.
That would kill the franchise car dealer system, so none of the big automotive players will jump on board this concept. It would take a start-up that doesn't have any entrenched interests in their supply and/or sales chains to make something like this a reality. And considering the costs involved in designing a plant that can handle these kinds of orders, I just don't see a start-up having the necessary cash on hand to pull it off.
In other words, ain't gonna happen.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
"Silicon Valley may be a hub for design but other parts of the country have far more expertise in nuts-and-bolts manufacturing."
Lower wages, low energy costs, low cost of living, and no unions make South Carolina competitive. BMW didn't locate here by mistake, nor did Boeing.
Price yourself out of the market and the market will adapt.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Tesla happened in SV because the rest of the country doesn't have the start-up mentality. Better to do your design work here and then manufacture elsewhere. Going to Detroit is a mistake - old ways of doing things and lack of vision are pretty ingrained - look at the Volt.
Obama saved the unions at GM and Chrysler. He saved the names GM and Chrysler. He destroyed the bondholders, who by law own the company's assets when it goes bankrupt. He destroyed and continues to destroy the principle of rule by law. He preserved the principle of legally protected union thuggery.
Had GM and Chrysler gone bankrupt, the assets, if they were capable of productive use (which is saying if they were capable of doing more good than harm) would have been sold to organizations capable of running them at a profit. Instead they continue to bleed the economy, disguising losses with money from the government.
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The article says:
Wrong kind of engineers ...
Silicon Valley may have proficient coders oozing out of every condo complex, but it lacks--and isn't likely to develop--large numbers of engineers with the right mix of automotive mechatronics and high-voltage systems skills.
But it misses a point: Silicon Valley has the wrong kind of PROGRAMMERS, too. In particular, the valley's levels of software reliability and bug density are far too poor.
I started my programming career in Southeastern Michigan, and spent 15 of the first 20 years of it in the auto industry, so I know whereof I speak. ANY bit of software written for the auto industry is almost certainly life-critical. Some examples, from my own experience (mainly keeping the nightmare scenarios from happening):
- A bug in the idle speed control results in a line of cars that tends to stall after a car length or two when accelerating from a stop sign.
- A bug in the airbag testing software fires a proof-sample airbag while the worker is leaning over it on the test fixture (rather than after he's out of the chamber, the doors are closed, and the alarm has sounded for the required time).
- A bug in the plant energy management system blacks out all the lights in the factory while the workers are interacting with the still-operating machinery.
- A bug in the alarm system doesn't signal when the "flame curtain" over one end of the annealing oven fails. With no warning the plant soon fills (starting near the ceiling) with hot, carbon-monixide laden, "reducing atmosphere" gas, poisoning hundreds of workers before reaching lower-explosive-limit at an ignition source and blowing acres of roof into the next county.
And so on.
When I moved to Silicon valley I was ASTOUNDED at the low level of software reliability here. Design-for-reliability and even debugging subordinated to "feature velocity". Product shipped with hundreds, or thousands, of bugs. Business models that MONETIZED bugs - by selling contracts to fix them (creating the incentive to ship them for fixing later). And so on. (And open source isn't a cure for this: While it doesn't ship until the original programmer or team is happy with it, it mostly gets its reliability by accelerating the fixes, not by annealing the code into crystalline perfection BEFORE it first ships.)
Ship a bug in a car's software and you incur the cost of a RECALL.
At the first place I worked here in the valley one of my colleagues said I was the only guy he'd trust to program his pacemaker. Another said "["Rod"] takes three times as long to write code - but his stuff usually works the first time." (Which is not true: When you do it right - which involves getting the bugs out right away - you can code and debug blazingly fast. I would only deliver when something was finished to my satisfaction - after hundreds of debugging iterations. But my delivery of a completed project would be compared to single iterations of the others' debugging.)
Thus I gravitated (back) to "the hard side of the force" - moving into chip design. (It's of comparable complexity to a large application these days. And it's about the only function in the valley where Detroit-level reliability is valued: Eliminating a silicon spin is about equivalent to eliminating a recall in cost to the company, but it shows up in time-to-market savings.)
So while there are some other programmers like me available here, an auto company attempting to staff-up in Silicon Valley won't be looking for the sort of programmer that constitutes the bulk of the Valley's programming culture. (They'll do well to hire from "back home" in the rust belt or people transplanted from there, hardware designers, or programmers of medical, telecom, or MIL products.) Worse, the middle-managers here who administer the programmers are steeped in - actually the creators of - this software-unreliability culture. If the new auto company's personnel execs don't figure this out in time you can imagine the debacle when the product hits market - or the delays and cost during the delicate venture-funded stage as they try to retrofit quality into their firmware - or rip it out and replace it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way