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328 points doctoboggan | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.013s | source
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bjord ◴[] No.46235138[source]
is everyone designing their own silicon getting so much additional them-specific utility out of it that it's actually worth it?
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darth_avocado ◴[] No.46235215[source]
Rivian has a huge interest in being the outsourcer for legacy automakers. They’re not able to sell $100k cars enough and even with the promised R2, they probably will only be a small-ish player in the EV market. Their CEO recognizes how crazy good Chinese EVs are and currently they’re not even a competitor for Tesla.

But, VW is willing to pay $5B for their software platform. I think they want to extend that to being able to sell custom chips and “AI” capabilities, whatever that means.

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igor47 ◴[] No.46235424[source]
Which honestly is crazy to me. I have a Rivian, and to say the software is disappointing would be an understatement. There are heisenbugs galore; some examples:

* Doors refuse to open

* Lose the ability to control media playback using any controls

* Any button in the UI just opens and closes the windows

Granted, I'm a server side/backend engineer mostly, and I don't know much about writing software/firmware for a very hostile emf environment. But if any project I worked on had bugs like this, fixed at the rate they're fixed on Rivian, I would assume a badly flawed architecture or non existent technical leadership

Yet VW paid billions for this very software. I can't imagine how bad it must've been on their own stack that they gave up and bought this other seemingly broken stack

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WaxProlix ◴[] No.46235507[source]
This sounds nothing like my experience, you should get that vehicle serviced.
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1. amluto ◴[] No.46239416[source]
Service can’t do anything about the state machine being wrong.

The Rivian app does not permit you to send a command to the car while the app thinks the car is processing a command. Trunk opening? You can’t unlock the door. On top of this, if you try to open the trunk while outside Bluetooth range and then Bluetooth connects, you are still stuck waiting for the pending command to complete.

Oh, and the ridiculous “hey let’s always remind you that you own a Rivian” Live Activity seems to synchronize on a schedule that involves being hours and hours out of date.

The Rivian app sucks.

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2. WaxProlix ◴[] No.46240340[source]
I agree that the app leaves something to be desired - my personal pet peeve is that it shows stale or cached data while waiting to do some async update, leading to just outright fabricated charge or lock state. Never had those kinds of problems with the truck's software proper though