Tesla is just kicking ass in car apps — https://electrek.co/2019/09/15/tesla-v10-first-look-release-notes-features/.   They made an investment in a UX and data architecture and it is paying off.  Most carmakers are targeting where Tesla was 18-24 months ago, and by the time their cars ship, they will be even further behind.  

The carmakers have some options, none of which are easy:

• Embrace the phone.  Support Android Auto and CarPlay, give up on competing on base car UX and apps, and build auto-specific features and services on top of Android Auto and CarPlay.  This is not a terrible strategy, carmakers can focus their energy on car-specific features.  Xevo works with a number of carmakers on upcoming solutions along these lines, these will be good experiences.
• Try to drag race Tesla.  Some carmakers are trying this, it will be difficult to win this drag race if the carmaker is not tapping into software development talent in one of the software development centers — Bay Area, Seattle, NYC.  Xevo works with a couple of OEMs on this basis, tapping into the great Seattle ecosystem and labor market.  This is a tough strategy though and maybe the highest risk strategy.
• Leapfrog Tesla.  Open up the car UX and car data to a full software ecosystem.  Get 10,000 companies targeting the vehicles.  Carmakers are historically resistant to this, wanting to hold onto all aspects of car UX and car data, but just as the industry transitioned from feature phones to smartphones, the industry will make a transition to a more open car software ecosystem, and benefits will accrue to those who lead the transition.  Xevo also works with OEMs on this basis.

These strategies are not mutually exclusive — every carmaker has many nameplates, model years, and regions — they have a lot of at bats, and can try out variants of these strategies, and learn from each trial.  The key thing is to set a reach goal for the software ecosystem in the car, and get moving aggressively on some of these strategies.

• The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker. In the late 1800s in NYC, a golem and a jinni struggle to fit into human society and become human themselves. Very entertaining and a nicely introspective about what defines humanity. I’d had this on the Kindle forever, Vlad goaded me into reading.
• Arcadia by Iain Pears. A fantasy, science fiction, time travel, mystery, adventure, book within a book. A lot going on in here and very engaging.
• Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. Some compelling ideas but boy a lot of words. And in the last third of the book he goes off the rails, he has a mechanistic view of science and biology that feels very off. Still a good read but could be better.

• So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Very helpful coverage of a very tough topic.  Horrific recent news stories about personal attacks on the author.
• Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe.  A deep slice of history during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.  One hopes that the divisions being fostered in our own country never become as deep as those in Northern Ireland.

Writing software for cars is hard. Processors are generations behind mobile phones. Compute/network platforms are byzantine and fractured within/across OEMs. OS environments/toolchains are clunky/archaic. Internet connectivity is unavailable, intermittent, and costly.

Long OEM production cycles are fundamentally inconsistent with modern agile software cycles. OEMs aren’t excited about having more software. Security requirements are tough, durability/reliability requirements are tougher. There are substantial regulatory issues.

Nothing is easy, every line of code we ship seems to take a herculean effort. So why do we do it? There certainly must be easier hills to climb.

Well, cars are iconic products in our society. We use them every day, we spend an incredible amount of time in them. Our friends and family all use them, and when we do something right in them, everyone we care about will notice.

And there is plenty of room to do better. The user experience for software and services is not good today. With a very few exceptions, people don’t like their in-car experience.

We are in the “feature phone” period of car UX; Xevo and other companies working to open up the car software and data platforms to 1000s of apps, and open up the environment to the kind of continuous iteration that has driven advances in mobile and cloud software.

And the opportunity for innovation and learning is great. We are working on deeply interesting UX problems and distributed processing problems that are unique to the automotive space today, but have very broad applicability.

Figuring out how to do engaging distraction-free apps, how to partition processing across widely-distributed networks of untrusted vehicles, how to monetize data while protecting privacy – these are all interesting and fascinating and are being driven by the automotive environment.

And that is what attracts us – the chance to make big changes in the auto experience, the chance to learn and work on great problems, the chance to work with great like-minded people. If you know of anyone who might be excited about the challenges, please introduce them!

• Girl Waits With Gun by Amy Stewart. Great story based of a budding female detective in the early 1900s. Based on a real person, this is a great retelling.
• How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr. The history of the US’s various territories and possessions. Guess what, we have often treated the people in these territories poorly (and still do today). Kind of a goofy title for the book but interesting.
• The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio. There have been times in my life when I would have eaten this up, but this isn’t one of those times. A very deep look at emotions and consciousness and the body, and I find it wearing.

• The Old Man by Thomas Perry. A lazy suspense novel, unimpressed. The action moves along ok but the characters are tissue thin. And when I see a character arrive in Vancouver on a train and “catch a cab to Victoria”, I just get pissed off, the author is just sloppy.
• The Collapsing Empire and The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi. Entertaining and fun, kind of an homage to Asimov’s Foundation series.
• The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean. A delightful walk thru the periodic table and all of the human stories behind the elements.   Very engaging.

• Walkaway by Cory Doctorow.  My first Doctorow, and I am not sure I will do any more.  A hash of steampunk, cyberpunk, biohacking, post-gender, libertarian themes all jammed into a stew, and there just isn’t much story or character in there.
• Less by Andrew Sean Greer. Contrast with above, a great character finding himself in the middle part of his life.  Informed by the generations before and after him as they deal with their own crises.
• Babel by Gaston Dorren.  A look at each of the top 20 most used languages in the world.  And a lot of cultural insight along the way.  Very good.

• The Genius Plague by David Walton. Award Winner, and has some great concepts, but wasn’t an amazing story. Fun but forgettable.
• Empty Planet by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson.  Very interesting book about declining birth rates and the implications for us.  No real conclusions but thought provoking.  There are some vitriolic reviews on Amazon claiming bias, and as you read the reviews, it is clear the reviewers are heavily biased, which just made me more interested in the book.
• Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz.  Good but not great.  I love books that play with structure, but this didn’t really go anywhere with the concept.

• Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. I hate pop business books but this book does not belong in that category. A timeless approach to the basics of strategy, whether in business or any other setting.
• The Helicopter Heist by Jonas Bonnier. Gripping, the last half of the book was a rollercoaster. Looking forward to rumored Netflix treatment.
• The Plotters by Un-su Kim. Thriller, a little surreal, even a bit of a parable. Interesting tho not something I would want to diet steadily on.
• Snap by Belinda Bauer. The cover claims this book is long listed for the Man Booker Prize, and that is normally the kiss of death for me, I find the winners to be unreadable. But this is a great thriller and a lot of fun.

• Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. Really great book about decision making, and how to think probabilistically about decisions. Very good.
• Change Agent by Daniel Suarez.  Suarez is always super fun, this is a great tale of genetic editing and the criminal behaviours it may lead to.
• The Mueller Report.  A bit of a slog but something everyone should read.
  • I came away angrier at FB/TWIT for failing to aggressively address their roles in election interference
  • I am angry at the Trump administration and all parts of the government for failing to aggressively defend our political system.  The identified Russian actions to manipulate our elections are certainly just the tip of the iceberg.
  • And there seems little doubt about obstruction, and obstructive actions continue today.
• A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe by Alex White.  Fun space romp.

In a recent article about the latest VW Golf, the product manager was quoted “Already now there are ten times more lines of code in the latest Golf than in a smartphone”. This statement is interesting in some many directions.

Software content in a car is growing exponentially as connectivity, autonomy, sensors, new compute platforms, electrification all drive into the car and this VW metric is an interesting indicator.

But is that too much software? It seems like my cellphone is jammed full of software, does my car really need 10X the lines of code?

But then the car has at least two major compute domains (UX and drive control) with many smaller compute loads, and maybe it is reasonable to have a lot more software than a smartphone?

Is KLOCs the right way to measure software? That is an ’80s way of thinking about software content and leads to some very bad behavior. Should anyone be proud of this?

What is the quality level of that software? Modern smartphones and the services that power them have the most highly compensated people in the industry banging away on them. How should we feel about a software system with 10x the number of components but with less highly compensated engineers? What is the total lifetime cost of all that software? What is the security exposure of all the software?

The biggest challenge VW is struggling with is OTA updates per the article. The OTA challenge in a car is broad – firmware, headunits, apps all have their own lifecycles and OTA needs. Is there an understanding that a great architecture for OTA and application isolation in the car are probably the first things that should have been put in place?

How much software should be on your mobile phone and in the cloud to support your driving? More or less than is in the car itself? How does that change when your car is always connected?

It is fascinating time in the auto industry. Software content is growing by leaps and bounds. While the VW number may be too high today, there is going to be a LOT more software content in cars over time.

• Our Towns by James and Deborah Fallows. An uplifting walk thru towns and cities across America, each of which is finding its way and wrestling successfully with renewal, growth, education, immigration. There is a lot of great stuff happening everywhere — we shouldn’t let the national miasma blind us. One observation they make — almost every town on an upward track has a micro brewery.
• Those Who Knew by Idra Novey. Not my usual style but a satisfying tale of a corrupt politician whose life ultimately unravels, and lifting of that weight off the people around him.
• Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft. First in a series about a world dominated by a steampunk-ish Tower of Babel. Part allegory, part swashbuckler. A great deal of fun.

• The Library Book by Susan Orlean. A peek inside the history, operations, and stories behind the LA Public Library, written by someone who loves books and libraries. Really enjoyable.
• Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. Surprisingly fantastic tale of a young woman in Manhattan finding her way in the world pre WWII. Started slow but oh my gosh did it pick up. Inspiring in many ways.
• The Doubtful Guest by Edward Gorey. Just because I needed some weird.

• Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit by Christof Spieler. Oh I love maps, and this book is chock full of them, and a great overview of transit in the US. It is easy to focus just on your community and not see the big picture, this really helps to provide context. If you just read Seattle papers, you’d think Seattle is screwing up transit constantly, but this book suggests Seattle is doing a decent job at building out an effective system.
• Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality by Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton. This book intrigues and aggravates me. Which means it is worth reading and thinking about. A pretty damning takedown of the mainstream college education experience. It doesn’t line up with my own experience – but I saw signs of this dark side, and maybe I just lived in ignorance due to my focus and my advantages heading into college.
• 1491 by Charles Mann. Great exploration of the civilizations in America before the arrival of the Europeans. I don’t think I realized just how dramatic the die off due to European diseases was, nor how as a result, the world lost cultures and civilizations that rivaled those of Asia. Sobering, sad.

These seem interesting – from five books