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VW Says China To Become Global Software Development Hub For Autonomous Tech (reuters.com)
Volkswagen will use Chinese software developers to help design a global autonomous vehicle architecture thanks to the prevalence of qualified programmers which carmakers are struggling to hire elsewhere, senior executives said on Monday. Reuters reports: As carmakers scramble to develop advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving functions, carmakers are struggling to find qualified engineers to build the software algorithms needed to teach cars the right reflexes. Volkswagen has 4,000 engineers in China, with an average age of 29, spread over five research and development sites and a rapidly growing number of software engineers. "In a short period from now they will be able to do 15 to 20 million lines of programming code on an annual basis," Volkswagen China's passenger cars chief Stephan Woellenstein said in Shanghai on Monday.
The prevalence of software engineers, combined with the country's willingness to roll out the infrastructure for connected and self-driving cars, will make China one of the first markets in which autonomous cars gain widespread acceptance, VW managers said. As a result, Chinese suppliers will help Volkswagen Group to design a global autonomous vehicle architecture, he said.
The prevalence of software engineers, combined with the country's willingness to roll out the infrastructure for connected and self-driving cars, will make China one of the first markets in which autonomous cars gain widespread acceptance, VW managers said. As a result, Chinese suppliers will help Volkswagen Group to design a global autonomous vehicle architecture, he said.
Don't think I'd trust the software developed under a sweatshop-like 12 hours a day 6 days a week regime, sorry VW. Software made in the us by foremost experts in the field is bad enough to run into firetrucks as it is, this shit will explode when you press the engine start button.
be for use in cars in China.
Then for use in cars that China will export.
German brands are tolerated for the crypto keys to EU academic support.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Considering products from Volkswagen group do not function as advertise, why do they need 4,000 engineers to produce fake results?
Also, producing 15 to 20 million lines of code per year sounds like a clear attempt to make sure regulators can't keep up with auditing the code. It should be really easy for a "rogue engineer" to hide another "cheat device" in such a large haystack.
Who'd want to live there :| Sry
[($)]
After all these years, nay, decades of writing software, after all the evidence to the fact that the number of lines of code have absolutely no positive correlation to the software's quality (on the contrary) they still use it as a metric. metric of what? their ability to hit the keyboard?
Beware chinaman bearing gifts. He clean out IP while you no looking.
man i dont know the advertisment department does it. ... soon you wont even be able to own a car anymore. cars are just taxis owned, manufactured and operated by one company. good luck getting a ride if your "chinese social score" isnt up to snuff not to mention execution by car crash after judgment in absentia...
in reality the push for autonomous driving cars is a slap in the face of each buyer.
it implies that car makers think customers are lazy and dumb.
lazy because they dont want to druve themselfs and dumb because, really a computer can drive better then you.
so, there you go
Ya they haven't got that yet :/
[($)]
BTW, every piece of an autonomous driving system is safety critical and should have actual engineering sing-offs.
Relying on slave labour after all is in their genes, there's a reason the company is called "Volkswagen". I guess you can take Volkswagen out of the third Reich, but you can't take the third Reich out of Volkswagen.
I wonder why. Speaking as someone who keeps getting turned down for embedded dev jobs despite having PIC and arduino programming experience along with my 20+ years of system level C,C++ and x86 assembler programming, I suspect its the usual case of a company wanting high grade skills but only wanting to pay low grade wages.
They have stolen tesla tech and now we can catch up.
Now that the war is over and we at Volkswagen don't have a sufficient supply of slave labor we're packing up and going someplace that does
It is not about them not being able to find good devs, it is a matter of them not wanting to pay decent salaries and cheap/slave labour being available in China.
I don't know why the Germans are trying to run this shell of a company today.
Needs better management.
As an engineer this stuff makes me a bit concerned. I don't really see any reason why China is not going to take the bulk of the engineering jobs from western countries over the next ten years in the same way they took all the manufacturing jobs. I work a lot with Chinese suppliers. Over the last 10 years there has been a real shift. Sure you can still get your 'classic chinese experience' in Shenzhen, where you rock on up, expect to beat every supplier into the ground with cheap prices, then struggle with quality issues for the next 12 months. But if you go there and pay reasonable prices for stuff, then you get great service, great quality and good support. This part of the market seems to be growing rapidly over there.
The chinese understand quality as well as most western people. It is just that many companies only go to china for cost reasons, so the chinese attempt to meet those cost expectations by cutting corners. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. If you go to the cheapest car repair shop you should expect that it is more likely they will try to rip you off.
The trouble is that the Chinese have all the supply chain at the moment and this gives them a foot in the door of western companies. I know of a number of companies here in the UK where manufacturing was moved to china, and the chinese contractor offered to do the mech design on the company's next product for free. They did a good job and soon enough management was downsizing the engineering department and shipping that work offshore.
They can do good mech engineering now, and electronics design, so why does anyone believe they won't be able to do software as well? I think it is just a matter of time.
The problem for western countries is that their governments still believe they have some sort of inherent superiority; that just because they are 'developed' they will always be rich. So rather than taking china head on by investing in modern manufacturing and STEMS they invest in financial innovations that will apparently make us all rich despite producing no real value. It is a dangerous game, and in my opinion, at some point all this financial innovation will be show to be the fraud that it is, and the west will quickly discover that a bunch of engineers (or construction grunts for that matter) in a room is much more useful that a stadium full of lawyers when the real world infrastructure that supports western standards of living has fallen apart.
Realistically the best hope for the west is that China gets taken over by lawyers and bean counters as well. What a sad state of affairs.
Wait until someone here develops it so they can steal the IP (their biggest industry). It's funny/not funny seeing devices my group and I designed that, after building a manufacturing plant in China (because you can't sell in China unless you build it in China) are being sold, pretty much unchanged other than branding, in China and elsewhere. Not much in China that wasn't stolen from somewhere else. They're great at the manufacturing stuff (drones) but Communism pretty much kills creativity. China is nothing but idea thieves and slave labor.
VW owners have been complaining that when they are in their car and make negative comments about various members of government, the vehicle abruptly changes course and drives them to the nearest police station while requesting intervention by the assigned political officer.
US schools have long been a destination for international students. Those students don't come here because our universities stink.
I have a CS degree and have been involved in IT/Technology for over 20 years. During that 20 years, IT jobs have become far less desirable than they used to be. Long hours and the fear of being replaced by foreign labor has made a new generation of kids look elsewhere for career paths.
During my time in school, anyone with a brain went into STEM. Now that I have kids, I see the different education choices being made by them. Kids with a brain are once again considering the trades instead of a career in a cubicle.
You can blame government and the school system if it makes you feel better, but it won't change the fact that the industry and employers made this line of work less desirable - and now there is a shortage of qualified software professionals.
If you want to fix this problem - let the market do its thing. Limit guest worker labor to only very high-end specialized positions. Allow wages to rise - and eventually smart people will again go into those fields.
The prevalence of software engineers, combined with the country's willingness to roll out the infrastructure for connected and self-driving cars, will make China one of the first markets in which autonomous cars gain widespread acceptance, VW managers said.
Also, China's blatant disregard for individual well-being will help with the roll out. If a few people get killed during testing, no biggie.
Simple...
Communist Party in exchange for know-how transfer will allow VW to test the cars on their citizens without legal risk.
In 20 years Chinese companie will dominate car market and VW will be as popular as Ericson in cell phone now...
No translation needed "Now that we in the United States have killed off all the natives and passed the thirteenth amendment and a minimum wage, we are pleased to announce the outsourcing of our corporate slave labor to the lowest bidder of a wide variety of developing Nations"
Does not know a lot about software development. Time to short VW IMHO.
Right, because immigration and outsourcing have done nothing to assault wages and the incentive structure for the working and middle classes. You are a racist who hates aspiring potential True Americans if you notice that adding a few million workers in a few year period goes a long way to ensure that supply always meets or exceeds demand. You are practically Hitler if you notice that the explosion in immigration over the last 30 years is probably the main reason why we've seen only about 14% real wage growth over two generations.
That's the simple fact.
Uber is the only autonomous car dev that has a confirmed kill and it was a very expensive setback.
In China the AI can literally run over dozens of people a day and the government backed enterprise would simply laugh it off and try again.
Actually in China they would probably modify the code to back up and run them over again... the cost of a dead Chinese is cheaper than an injured one.
I'm flabbergasted that a German company has sunken to the level of becoming a propaganda tool for Winnie The Pooh. There must be something desperate going on at the German Gesellschaft. What happened to German engineering and German Stolz over their engineering skills?
These are supposed to be systems where safety, reliability and performance are most important. You can't achieve these goals without an appropriate language (ladder logic) and an appropriate platform (PLC). Any effort that tries otherwise is bound to cause crashes and casualties, regardless of where it was developed.
"thanks to the prevalence of qualified programmers which carmakers are struggling to hire elsewhere, "
VW's software developer were (are?) busy developing cheating software to get around the emission laws, thereby accepting willingly the death of additional thousands of people just for greed.
Another great reason to stick with BMW
First GLOBAL cellular infrastructure development (Huawei's 5G), and now GLOBAL autonomous vehicle architecture development. In all seriousness, China is making some very scary moves. This is the first point in history where the US has a serious contender to the "global superpower" throne... the next decade will undoubtedly decide the fate of this title.
"The cause of fear is ignorance."
qualified programmers WILLING TO WORK 996 for less than a living wage, and who won't complain, or blow whistles about cheating emission standards, for fear of damaging their social credit and being put into a death camp
fuck the chinese and fuck hitler's car company
lolol
I didn't want to have anything to do with so-called 'autonomous cars' before, and I sure as fuck won't want to have anything to do with it if one of the biggest enemies of the West is going to have this much to do with it. I sure hope for Volkswagens' sake they audit every single line of code that comes out of China.
One would think that the German's would know better.
There was a German engineering firm that outsourced the manufacturing of a revolutionary new type of lathe design to a company in the PRC to try and cut costs.
At a manufacturing convention attendees from the same company noticed at least a dozen Chinese copies of their new lathe.
Soon after that the same company was out of business, unable to compete with cheap copies of their products flowing into the EU from the PRC.
Corporations in the PRC are extensions of the CPC.
The potential economic damage that could be caused by a trade war was secondary to the CPC.
The loss of access to IP was considered far more critical to them.
I work at a chinese owned car company, a big one, but we don't yet have a sales presence in the US.
we have thousands in china and a few hundred in the bay area.
I often can see the difference in approach and code quality between east and west.
all I will say is: code and design from china mostly sucks.
Sucks even worse than Tesla "Autopilot" code?
It actually makes sense to develop these cars in China. It's not that there are more qualified software developers in China, more than say in India, the US, or Europe. Part of the reason is that the wages are lower, although not lower than in other countries. The main reason is that China will be the largest market for autonomous vehicles due to several reasons. There is a push to electrify cars, which means new a lot of new cars bought in the future. There are huge emerging classes of workers will have or will soon have the money to buy these cars. The government is pushing these new cars and autonomous vehicles for economic, environmental, and competitive reasons. And China has the governmental structure to ensure that laws and lawsuits do not derail autonomous vehicle adoption. It's this last reason that is perhaps the most important.