Tesla designs its exclusively electric vehicles primarily as computers on four wheels. It is obviously reductive, but the most important asset of the manufacturer is not its batteries, nor its electric motors, even less its pretty boat design if we forget the Cybertruck. The main thing is the processor and all the other computer chips at the heart of the machine and even more the constant updates of cars, like computers.
This choice is not new, it was made from the start by the manufacturer led by Elon Musk. The first Roadster was just a variant of a thermal car already on the market, but the Model S, the first vehicle designed by Tesla, already offered its huge touch screen and updates sent over the internet. Difficult to speak of novelty when you think that this car was marketed almost eight years ago, but Tesla remains the only company on the market to have this approach.
And the Californian firm is probably far from being worried by the historic manufacturers, at least not on this ground. Driven in particular by European legislation which requires them to electrify their range, traditional players are all starting to produce electric cars. And some are starting to approach the autonomy of Tesla, even if they remain models in terms of efficiency, but none has taken the IT approach above all. And it’s not about to change if we judge the attitude of Toyota, the world’s number one.
The Japanese giant is not only lagging behind in the electric sector, even though it was a pioneer in the sector many years ago with the Prius, the first mass-produced hybrid car. The site Nikkei Asian Review debossed a Model 3 with engineers from Toyota and Volkswagen, number two in the world. Conclusion: these two manufacturers are unable to reproduce what Tesla has done and the sector specialists interviewed by the site estimate that the Californian could be six years ahead in the field.
It must be said that Tesla started earlier and has not slowed down since 2012, quite the contrary. The role of IT has grown over the years, as evidenced by the extremely stripped-down dashboard of the Model 3. From the driver’s point of view, everything is done by the touch screen, the only point input to control everything. More fundamentally, the computer is at the heart of the company’s strategy, particularly in the area of autonomous driving.
It is to achieve this goal that the manufacturer has bombarded its cars with cameras and put big on artificial intelligence. It was also to achieve this that he began to design his own chips, to achieve the immense computing power required. Like Apple in its time with internally created systems on a chip, Tesla hopes to achieve its ambitious goal on autonomous driving first. Maybe another actor in the Silicon Valley will do better, but probably not a traditional builder.
Where Tesla creates its own custom chips, Toyota, Volkswagen and the others assemble hundreds of parts supplied by their subcontractors. The worst part is that one of the engineers interviewed by the Nikkei justifies this “choice” by the need to preserve these subcontractors and the relationship maintained for years by the historic builders. This is surprising reasoning, but one that often comes up for electric cars, which are much easier to create than those with an internal combustion engine. Some traditional players are worried about losing their place if their expertise related to technologies that have always existed until then is no longer needed.
Which doesn’t mean Tesla got it all, or that anyone can do it as well. Managing a car like a computer requires a lot of expertise too, but they are different. Elon Musk’s never-before-promised promises in autonomous driving prove that the job is not as easy as he wants to repeat. And then Tesla sometimes has a tendency to trust IT too much, with extremely complex solutions to already resolved problems.
Computerization and permanent connection also come with their drifts. It is almost impossible to use a Tesla without updating it when a new version of the system is available, even if it reduces the autonomy of your car. IT also makes it possible to charge afterwards for additional functions, or even to improve performance. And as this recent example proves when an American buyer had the unpleasant surprise of losing their functions after having updated their second-hand Model S, computerization is undoubtedly not only good.
Drawbacks, of course, but think of all the advantages of this approach! The multiple improvements in autonomous driving do not benefit the new owners of Model 3, all those who bought a copy benefit from it. Likewise for the faster charge released last year, or for the entertainment options offered during charging.
Other manufacturers will probably end up offering the same kind of functions. But as Volkswagen has seen with its ID3 also designed around a remotely updated computer, it’s not as easy as you might think, especially on a large scale. You don’t just have to put a processor in your car, you also have to code the entire operating system and also provide a whole infrastructure for updates. And meanwhile, Tesla is not going to brutally stop improving its system …
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