BMW iM3 - The Future Electric M3 Super Sedan

[Ws6]

I'm just basing it on my experience stuffing it from a dead stop, it pawed pretty hard from the front coming out of the hole, giving a bit of torque steer, but that tapered off pretty quickly once you were moving and then it just pulled like a freight train. Stuffing it from a decent roll (25-30Mph) didn't invoke any discernible wheelspin, it just squatted and took off.

I can spin the fronts a hair from a 25-30mph roll, and the front motor in my GT produces less power and I have larger front tires and am running PSAS4s. That said, I don't know the power curve on these motors, except the GT had a much higher rpm, so maybe that shifts the output up in the range a bit, and is why I seem to have a bit of slip around 25-35 while you experienced it more early on. Id love to see more EV dynos!

My 60' times on psas4s on unprepped pavement are 1.86-1.89 typically. I looked at i4M50 and they seem to be identical.

 

[Ws6]

Having had to capitalize on my 70+ R&D team a second year, sadly, offshoring this has never been more attractive.

That is not viable in my industry, but remote work is, in some areas, and it always reduces capability, IME.

 

[UncleDave]

That is not viable in my industry, but remote work is, in some areas, and it always reduces capability, IME.

I don't think I wrote that very well -The way the feds treat R&D now is a radical departure from tax law prior to 2022.

I cant even deduct my R&D like normal poeple, but only get to deduct 1/5 of their total cost each year.
This change has the effect of creating phantom income.

It used to be if you spent 100M on developing a product and sold 10M the first year you could deduct 90M as an operating loss.
The same formula from 22 on creates about 6.5m in income instead of a 90M loss along with the associated tax burden of now " earning" 6.5M (that you didnt earn).

New capitalization law basically turns my R&D effort into a piece of purchased equipment and Im essentially buying a 17.5M product every year, that I get to deduct in 5 years.

 

[Ws6]

I don't think I wrote that very well -The way the feds treat R&D now is a radical departure from tax law prior to 2022.

I cant even deduct my R&D like normal poeple, but only get to deduct 1/5 of their total cost each year.
This change has the effect of creating phantom income.

It used to be if you spent 100M on developing a product and sold 10M the first year you could deduct 90M as an operating loss.
The same formula from 22 on creates about 6.5m in income instead of a 90M loss along with the associated tax burden of now " earning" 6.5M (that you didnt earn.

New capitalization law basically turns my R&D effort into a piece of purchased equipment and Im essentially buying a 17.5M product every year, that I get to deduct in 5 years.

Thats absolutely nuts.

 

[UncleDave]

Thats absolutely nuts.

It's driving R&D out of our country at a high rate of speed.

 

[Ws6]

It's driving R&D out of our country at a high rate of speed.

Yup.

 

[PandaBear]

As digital transformation continues to change our world, BMW and the rest will have to change, adapt and find their way. Everyone else is playing checkers while Tesla is playing chess. Anyone else's firmware development vertically integrated?

Tech is a differentiate-er, a disrupt-er and quickly becoming requisite. Go big or go home. Who's the big boy now?

Firmware dude here, tell Tesla they need to do a better job if they can put logging on the same flash chip with the firmware and wore it out with logging and brick the controller. Such a nob mistake.

They should have license from someone, anyone, like Denso Bosch or whoever else out there. If they still want to DIY they should at least license an SDK from a reputable company who has customers already testing them in the field for a few years.

 

[PandaBear]

Dunno. But the unified functionality could produce something really amazing. Sorta like the hp wars of the 60's.
I seriously doubt this level of car functionality consolidation exists off the shelf today.

Usually, to avoid accidental mistakes from one side causing problem in another, there are stuff that are kept physically apart. You just can't guarantee no bugs or mistakes as we are all human. Remember The Critics said a Ford turning signal light cracks, leaking water, shorting the CAN bus, and can't start the powertrain because of that? That's what you want to avoid.

Having a "unified" something is nice but you probably do not want an infotainment bug causing powertrain to crash while driving, or a voltage short in your speakers causing a controller in the regen braking or battery control system to fry when you go downhill.

If they are physically separated you can do a lot less testing and be a lot more confident things would be ok in the worst case scenarios. Imagine testing the entire car up and down Grapevine for a week when you want to release a new infotainment system firmware on your Tesla......

 

[PandaBear]

Google and Apple are both innovative high tech companies. Both are into far more than smartphones. As you say, Google is not a smartphone company the way Apple is. By the way, doesn't Foxconn make the majority of iPhones? Apple has created an ecosystem vs Google's more open source methodology. Apple's biggest revenue source is the iPhone (but not their highest margin) while Google's is their Search engine and resulting ad revenue, I believe. Both will continue to grow and innovate; both are leaders based in technology. Both are disrupters.

I made no mention of buttons, in fact I am talking about a much different topic. I am talking about the integration of automobile components via a software first approach. Teslas are built around a single central software architecture. My thread is about BMW taking this to the next level. Buttons and iPads are the front end interface to software, they are not the software. However, a digital interface can be programmed to perform more tasks than manual controls, not to mention voice controls which is what I make use of.

"No compromise" refers to a single purpose approach to a product. If a company codes firmware for its own products, there is no need to entertain other requirements. This is a prime benefit of vertical integration. Complete control from design forward. My career was a prime example; I was up against ASK Manman and SAP but had a clear advantage in that I had only 1 customer to satisfy.

No one says BMWs are not great cars, certainly not me. No one would discount their legendary history. BMW's fit and finish is world class. Upscale German painting is as good as it gets. I've not heard anyone say this about Tesla. This is not the topic of my thread, which I stated in the title and 1st post.
My post is speaking to technology in a forward sense. In the short term, distributed outsourcing strategy reduces production costs but in the long term, legacy automakers lose the ability to adapt, innovate and advance technology. From a top level system point, differing product integration can be a nightmare. Smart components do what they do best but may not talk to each other requiring overhead software, not to mention duplicated low level code.
Tesla has literally billions of miles of real world driving data that is being used in AI research and development. Are other companies deeply vested in AI? Perhaps you are more familiar with other company approaches to concepts like the Dojo Supercomputer.

From the vehicle software integration (and consolidation) standpoint, BMW just might leap frog Tesla with their Heart of Joy innovation. Pretty darn cool, advanced and forward looking if ya ask me. While they haven't done so yet I salute their efforts and product direction.
Interesting times ahead, for sure.

I hope this clarifies my position and as always I respect other's.

BTW, just so you know, Apple doesn't write all their own software. A lot of their products use outside tech and they license their stuff from vendors who know better all the time.

Your iphone with Qualcomm modem chip? Qualcomm firmware. The Broadcom wifi chip? Broadcom firmware. They don't show it to you obviously and are rolled into their package to release, but they know they want the best stuff from outside and they frequently hire from their vendors as well. Some even have support office on site in their building next to their inhouse engineers helping them integrate outside firmware into their own.

I know Google's phone division years ago was the same. Amazon is also doing that with their devices and internal data center stuff.

 

[PandaBear]

Having dealt with QNX for many years, I would argue against it being pretty darn good . BMW already uses QNX though. QNX has good salespeople that like to convince you Linux is scary and Germans like pain so it's a winning combination. I've spent the past 10 years designing it out of devices in favor of Linux.

Apple just uses some of BSD userspace, but it's really a non-critical component I'd say. They reached and picked something serviceable, and then built all of their frameworks on top of it.

The main issue is that the major OEMs other than Tesla outsource pretty much everything and have a very old-school "module" mentality. It's a convenient separation of concerns and probably the only way to effectively manage outsourcing everything, but it gives you no architectural flexibility once you've defined it initially.

Flexibility is always going to be in conflict with stability, you have to figure out where you want the boundary to be for a good reason.

If you love the flexibility go buy a Tesla. If you want stability go buy a 90s Toyota. I suspect Tesla has no other way than to build their own because they are building something that doesn't yet exist, but that doesn't mean it is the best approach when what most of your customers want is a boring ride that would last 2 decades trouble free. I expect Tesla to be fun and cool, but I wouldn't expect it to be stable and cheap years down the road.

 

[chris719]

Oops double post

 

[chris719]

Flexibility is always going to be in conflict with stability, you have to figure out where you want the boundary to be for a good reason.

I think you can achieve both higher quality and performance / feature set by insourcing more. Now, can Tesla? Probably not because they don’t care much about quality, only iterating as fast as possible

 

[PandaBear]

I think you can achieve both higher quality and performance / feature set by insourcing more. Now, can Tesla? Probably not because they don’t care much about quality, only iterating as fast as possible

You cannot take shortcut to get quality. You either have to buy it from someone who already has it (reasonable to reward someone for their work), or you have to hire people to do it right.

For Tesla or other "fast" companies, having things in-house make it easier for them to move fast. It doesn't take 1 or 2 weeks to file a complain to the vendor and have them fix a problem you found (it could be your problem or their problem), it can be done internally much much faster. It doesn't always save you money; it can be actually more expensive as you need to hire people to reinvent the wheel, and the same product your vendor sell could be sold to 5-10 customers vs your own in-house stuff is used only by you. To achieve the same stability, in-house design need X times as many years or people like their vendors to scale to the same. Denso probably has 1 controller architecture they can sell to Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mazda, maybe a few more outside of Japan (Chinese? early Korean? Chrysler?) Tesla would probably need 50% of Denso's R&D budget to reach the same stability in-house for just ONE customer (themselve). But, they don't have to wait if they do it inhouse. They can do whatever they want fast, but they or their customers have to test for things that have already been done in Denso, for example (Prius' controller never had ECU problem even 20 years ago).

There are probably only 1 or 2 USB port IP out there, everyone just license the same design and slap it into their own (I think the original IP cam from NEC or something).

 

[Torrid]

You cannot take shortcut to get quality. You either have to buy it from someone who already has it (reasonable to reward someone for their work), or you have to hire people to do it right.

For Tesla or other "fast" companies, having things in-house make it easier for them to move fast. It doesn't take 1 or 2 weeks to file a complain to the vendor and have them fix a problem you found (it could be your problem or their problem), it can be done internally much much faster. It doesn't always save you money; it can be actually more expensive as you need to hire people to reinvent the wheel, and the same product your vendor sell could be sold to 5-10 customers vs your own in-house stuff is used only by you. To achieve the same stability, in-house design need X times as many years or people like their vendors to scale to the same. Denso probably has 1 controller architecture they can sell to Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mazda, maybe a few more outside of Japan (Chinese? early Korean? Chrysler?) Tesla would probably need 50% of Denso's R&D budget to reach the same stability in-house for just ONE customer (themselve). But, they don't have to wait if they do it inhouse. They can do whatever they want fast, but they or their customers have to test for things that have already been done in Denso, for example (Prius' controller never had ECU problem even 20 years ago).

There are probably only 1 or 2 USB port IP out there, everyone just license the same design and slap it into their own (I think the original IP cam from NEC or something).

They seem to think they have it figured out(I'm not 100% confident). What I will say is if the write issues they had in the past that was bricking units in cars happens it will be my first and last Tesla. There is a fix that can be done swapping an SD card. The issue is that it isn't a real fix, it just resets the clock and it will eventually happen again as it doesn't have a way to dump this info. Because of the write times and space it has at least for earlier cars it would happen outside of warranty. Having someone who knows how to fix it and not rake you over the coals is probably pretty slim. Tesla will only sell you whole new stack with the screen which is basically everything because the way it is designed in those particular Model S', it is a bolted together metal framework similar to how Mercedes was doing it at the time. I've taken a number of them apart for a tracking system install I used to do with Hertz. I haven't taken apart a Model 3 to this level to see if it would be similarly serviceable if this was an issue.

Rich Rebuilds has a long video about all of this and shows how they "fixed" it. I was surprised how in depth they got

 

[PandaBear]

They seem to think they have it figured out(I'm not 100% confident). What I will say is if the write issues they had in the past that was bricking units in cars happens it will be my first and last Tesla. There is a fix that can be done swapping an SD card. The issue is that it isn't a real fix, it just resets the clock and it will eventually happen again as it doesn't have a way to dump this info. Because of the write times and space it has at least for earlier cars it would happen outside of warranty. Having someone who knows how to fix it and not rake you over the coals is probably pretty slim. Tesla will only sell you whole new stack with the screen which is basically everything because the way it is designed in those particular Model S', it is a bolted together metal framework similar to how Mercedes was doing it at the time. I've taken a number of them apart for a tracking system install I used to do with Hertz. I haven't taken apart a Model 3 to this level to see if it would be similarly serviceable if this was an issue.

Rich Rebuilds has a long video about all of this and shows how they "fixed" it. I was surprised how in depth they got

This is like my microwave range hood. The whole thing only cost $350 new and the touch pad delaminated. The replacement comes with the touchpad, the controller of the entire microwave, the stainless steel decoration, etc, cost $190. I screamed to the customer service at GE and they eventually reduce it down to $90 take it or leave it. I didn't want to reinstall the whole thing so I still bought it but would never buy from them again.

Eventually the microwave died and I replaced it with an identical lightly used one, and kept that "newish" replacement around just in case, eventually, when this happen again.

For Tesla, I guess this will be lifetime if they can last longer than the car is worth replacing battery. The problem though is if the ECU stack is locked or encrypted and you cannot just go to junkyard to swap things out. Or if the flash chip is encrypted and you cannot just clone from another copy on the internet for your car and solder in another chip to replace the worn out one. What it might end up is you have to get a rarely driven car that has a crash or premature battery damage, and replace every paired electronics to go with this just because they did something stupid back then. I wouldn't count on Tesla replace the chip for you at a discount when it is 20 years old and the flash chip is worn out from logging.

 

[Torrid]

This is like my microwave range hood. The whole thing only cost $350 new and the touch pad delaminated. The replacement comes with the touchpad, the controller of the entire microwave, the stainless steel decoration, etc, cost $190. I screamed to the customer service at GE and they eventually reduce it down to $90 take it or leave it. I didn't want to reinstall the whole thing so I still bought it but would never buy from them again.

Eventually the microwave died and I replaced it with an identical lightly used one, and kept that "newish" replacement around just in case, eventually, when this happen again.

For Tesla, I guess this will be lifetime if they can last longer than the car is worth replacing battery. The problem though is if the ECU stack is locked or encrypted and you cannot just go to junkyard to swap things out. Or if the flash chip is encrypted and you cannot just clone from another copy on the internet for your car and solder in another chip to replace the worn out one. What it might end up is you have to get a rarely driven car that has a crash or premature battery damage, and replace every paired electronics to go with this just because they did something stupid back then. I wouldn't count on Tesla replace the chip for you at a discount when it is 20 years old and the flash chip is worn out from logging.

Oh they won't replace it as a discount. They'll sell you the complete assembly. There's no negotiation with Tesla outside of warranty. I would be very surprised if it isn't coded to a level to make it near impossible to self swap a part without programming or swapping a strategic component to make it work. Most of the time Tesla won't sell you anything unless you take it to them to swap the part. That's the worst part about the company as cars get older and that's what launched the Rich Rebuilds YouTube channel.

 

[Ws6]

Oh they won't replace it as a discount. They'll sell you the complete assembly. There's no negotiation with Tesla outside of warranty. I would be very surprised if it isn't coded to a level to make it near impossible to self swap a part without programming or swapping a strategic component to make it work. Most of the time Tesla won't sell you anything unless you take it to them to swap the part. That's the worst part about the company as cars get older and that's what launched the Rich Rebuilds YouTube channel.

Even Ferrari sells engine parts. Thats just bs on Tesla's part.

 

[Carmudgeon]

This is like my microwave range hood. The whole thing only cost $350 new and the touch pad delaminated. The replacement comes with the touchpad, the controller of the entire microwave, the stainless steel decoration, etc, cost $190. I screamed to the customer service at GE and they eventually reduce it down to $90 take it or leave it. I didn't want to reinstall the whole thing so I still bought it but would never buy from them again.

Eventually the microwave died and I replaced it with an identical lightly used one, and kept that "newish" replacement around just in case, eventually, when this happen again.

For Tesla, I guess this will be lifetime if they can last longer than the car is worth replacing battery. The problem though is if the ECU stack is locked or encrypted and you cannot just go to junkyard to swap things out. Or if the flash chip is encrypted and you cannot just clone from another copy on the internet for your car and solder in another chip to replace the worn out one. What it might end up is you have to get a rarely driven car that has a crash or premature battery damage, and replace every paired electronics to go with this just because they did something stupid back then. I wouldn't count on Tesla replace the chip for you at a discount when it is 20 years old and the flash chip is worn out from logging.

The collar, or bushing that secures the pull-out spray handle in the base/stem on my kitchen faucet is wearing out, and allowing play to develop, which is not a desired trait on something that is regularly swiveled during the course of usage.

The maker, Kohler, does not break it out as a separate part, and instead offered to send an entire new faucet, without hesistation.

Tesla puts the bare minimum effort that it can in the servicing and supporting of their cars. Some will repeatedly espouse their methods as "forward thinking" and "cutting edge" or some form of 4D chess, but in durable, or white goods, terms, they might as well be treated as effectively disposable.

Even those who don't keep their vehicles long term might be caught out by their practices if not enough of an aftermarket support base develops.

For those who do keep their cars longer term, like an owner of a German marque who can walk into the dealer and order parts for a 25-year old model, that would be a bitter pill to swallow.

 

[Torrid]

Even Ferrari sells engine parts. Thats just bs on Tesla's part.

I'm not disagreeing. They don't seem to make it easy. I haven't dealt with it, but I've seen plenty not have a great time getting needed parts. Especially small random stuff.

 

[Ws6]

The collar, or bushing that secures the pull-out spray handle in the base/stem on my kitchen faucet is wearing out, and allowing play to develop, which is not a desired trait on something that is regularly swiveled during the course of usage.

The maker, Kohler, does not break it out as a separate part, and instead offered to send an entire new faucet, without hesistation.

Tesla puts the bare minimum effort that it can in the servicing and supporting of their cars. Some will repeatedly espouse their methods as "forward thinking" and "cutting edge" or some form of 4D chess, but in durable, or white goods, terms, they might as well be treated as effectively disposable.

Even those who don't keep their vehicles long term might be caught out by their practices if not enough of an aftermarket support base develops.

For those who do keep their cars longer term, like an owner of a German marque who can walk into the dealer and order parts for a 25-year old model, that would be a bitter pill to swallow.

Classic German cars aren't cheap. Rich people buy old German cars, poor people buy new ones.