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the guys who make power drills are writing the software for Self-Driving Cars[1]? Who is running that ship lol

[1] https://www.bosch.com/stories/future-vehicles/



Perhaps due to knowing quite a few people whose careers were spent working with Siemens and Bosch machines in heavy industry, it seems unfathomable and mildly alarming to me that one can

- know of the existence of Bosch,

- be completely ignorant of the company being an absolute giant in the engineering space, and

- be confident enough that they're some tiny power drill manufacturer to mock them publicly without pausing to look them up

It's like hearing someone say "the guys who make the Xbox are providing cloud services for the Pentagon? Who is running that ship lol".


The guys who have been making safety critical automotive electronics since it's infancy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control ) are getting questioned on core competency

-

Meanwhile there's the company who took Mobileye's LKA, which was already in cars with the same hardware but not continuously enabled because of inherent flaws related to non-moving objects... and turned it on all the time so they could call it Autopilot.

Then it killed some people because of the flaws that kept other manufacturers from using it the way they were.

And they're writing the software for self-driving cars? Who's running that ship lol

-

In a better world people with experience with safety critical stuff and the culture for it would partner with companies like Tesla to create something like a "plug in" system for SDCs. Where the safety guys could focus on defining a minimal viable envelope of operation the same way existing ABS and ESC systems mesh with drivers. Something like if the car is less than 100ms from crashing intervene separately of "normal" object avoidance

(And before someone nitpicks that's an arbitrary number of ms, yes there's no "isCrashing" variable, and yes it would be hard work to define how SDCs would handle intervention, but people crashing into parked firetrucks is worthwhile "hard thing" to solve)


Bosch has been doing electronic vehicle control systems since the first electric wiper motor. It is one of their core businesses.


If anything, Bosch is more of a car component supplier that happens to also make power drills on the side.


A “fire extinguisher” company makes many of the fire/smoke/overheat detection and suppression systems used in commercial and military aircraft. These kinds of companies are massive and have a lot more depth to them than you seem to realize.


Wait until they learn a jar company makes aerospace parts...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_Aerospace_%26_Technolog...


Huge companies have more than one product.


Do you know how much silly stuff Google makes in addition to self-driving cars?




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