Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Digital Twins for Software Defined Cars
Transcript
- 0:00John Summers is the motoring historian.
- 0:02He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept
- 0:07sports bike rider hailing from California.
- 0:10He collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and
- 0:12fast and not much reliable.
- 0:15On his show, he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new
- 0:18and old cars driving motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.
- 0:35Good day.
- 0:36Good morning, good afternoon.
- 0:37It is John Summers the motoring historian.
- 0:40Scalable digital twins for software defined vehicles.
- 0:47What does that even mean?
- 0:48You might say, and if you've not been listening to these ones
- 0:51that I've done that are about the software defined car or.
- 0:55AI State of the nation.
- 0:57This is kind of A-T-L-D-R on those, or a bit of a bolt on onto those.
- 1:01It's the same speaker series that I've been to down there in, uh, in Silicon
- 1:06Valley, organized by the Society of Automotive Engineers and Dr. Beaker.
- 1:11So thank you again.
- 1:12Spend for inviting me the speaker, this time with these guys remote labs.
- 1:18I mean, I'll add the link and, and so on, so you can have a, have a little look
- 1:22at who they are and and what they do.
- 1:24But, but fundamentally, all of the speakers in this series have been people
- 1:29who, organizations, companies that are involved in, you know, the building blocks
- 1:35of the new software defined vehicle.
- 1:38And I think the software defined vehicle is the end of.
- 1:41Cars as being something that's about freedom, and it's the beginning of
- 1:45being something which is as, uh, the McKinsey guy said in a, the software
- 1:49defined car presentation that I went to.
- 1:51It makes the car an edge of cloud device.
- 1:54It makes it like your phone.
- 1:56It means that there's some compute on your phone, you know,
- 1:59you can download stuff to it.
- 2:01There's some computing power on it, but most of your phone's functionality
- 2:05comes via its connectivity to the cloud.
- 2:08And the wonderful engineering integrity that tomorrow's cars are gonna have,
- 2:14that's going to come from the cloud.
- 2:17It's not gonna come from the piece of hardware that's sitting on your driveway.
- 2:21So if you think of it a hundred years ago, Fred and Orie, Dusenberg created
- 2:26the very best machine they could.
- 2:29And when you drove it off the forecourt, it was yours completely.
- 2:33It was yours.
- 2:34It was your domain.
- 2:36Now.
- 2:37It's not, is it?
- 2:38I mean, you might pay for it.
- 2:40You probably don't even own it outright.
- 2:42You're probably leasing it, but even if you do pay for it outright.
- 2:47What we're now talking about is over the airwaves upgrades.
- 2:51You know, the, you are a light at night sleeping and you know, your Tesla
- 2:56gets an upgrade so it can recharge its batteries that much faster.
- 3:00This is the world of the 21st century.
- 3:04Oh yes.
- 3:05So it means that the car that you.
- 3:07Off the driveway in the morning is actually not the same as the one that
- 3:12you parked in the driveway the night before and you don't have any idea
- 3:16what changes may have been made to it.
- 3:19So I don't want to be all dystopian about over the airwaves upgrades, but fuck's
- 3:25sake, just gimme the keys and let me go.
- 3:28It's about freedom.
- 3:29It's about freedom.
- 3:30It's not about a connected device.
- 3:34And I'm sorry, sir, I can't, I'm sorry, sir. You're gonna have to go through
- 3:38the touch screen and I'm, I'm sorry sir, are you sure you want to shut me down?
- 3:42Yes.
- 3:43I'm really, I'm sure I want to shut you down and flush you down the loo
- 3:48any car that makes me wanna communicate with it through the touch screen.
- 3:54I know Tesla are big into this, right?
- 3:56I've not really experienced a car that's got it.
- 3:59Of course, it's much cheaper if you can just have a button on a, in
- 4:03a piece of software than a button on a real dashboard, isn't it?
- 4:06So that's clearly the thinking behind it.
- 4:08Oh, the design's so clean.
- 4:09The Tesla will tell me, I say balls to that.
- 4:13It's all about making it cheap.
- 4:15A furious driving.
- 4:16A YouTuber who I follow recently reviewed a Geely, which is being sold in Britain.
- 4:22Of course it's being sold a great price, tons of content, but everything has
- 4:26to be run through the screen and, and I was amused that as he was trying to
- 4:31like toggle to turn off the annoying lane assist thing that was trying to put
- 4:36him into the hedge of the country road that he was driving along as he was.
- 4:40Toggling to try and turn that off.
- 4:42The car was getting crossed with him because it detected
- 4:44his eyes weren't on the road.
- 4:46I'm just like, you machines can all get in the fucking sea.
- 4:51You can all get in the sea, right?
- 4:53The car just needs to do what you tell it to like a hammer.
- 4:57You tell it go, it goes.
- 4:59I actually think I wrote an article about this some years ago.
- 5:02I actually think the cusp for this change was in the eighties and the nineties.
- 5:07So in other words, you know, my, uh, 95 Mustang with no a, b, s and
- 5:12no traction control free as a bird.
- 5:15Wrap around a lamppost if you want.
- 5:17It's not gonna stop you.
- 5:18The oh one car that I have, although his characters completely the same, feels
- 5:22exactly the same to drive the A BS and the traction control mean that there
- 5:28is a committee of electronic nannies.
- 5:32And I'll attribute that to Jeremy Clarkson, that's how he described it.
- 5:36A committee of electronic nannies that have to approve what you
- 5:41are doing before it happens.
- 5:42You push the throttle and the car's like, Hmm, let me see,
- 5:45is there gravel on the road?
- 5:46Oh, you've got a live axle.
- 5:48What might No.
- 5:49Right.
- 5:49No, that's not free.
- 5:55But anyway, I didn't sit down and do this recording to get up on my fuck
- 6:02the software defined car soapbox.
- 6:04No, I didn't do that at all.
- 6:06No.
- 6:06I hit the record button here so that we can all know exactly what stage we're at.
- 6:12Blow by blow as driving is being de invented.
- 6:16So scalable digital twins for software defined vehicles.
- 6:21What in the actual F does that mean?
- 6:25What it means is these guys remote labs, have a software product or
- 6:31a suite of software products which replicate in a virtual form components,
- 6:39which haven't yet been developed.
- 6:41So let's say that it's your job to develop the suspension system
- 6:45for the new pulse star, whatever.
- 6:47And in order for you to develop the suspension system, you have
- 6:51to know what the brakes look like.
- 6:52But the brake guys haven't yet designed their brake rotor, so you
- 6:57can't do any engineering around it.
- 6:59So what this leads to in traditional car development.
- 7:03Is, you know, if it takes five years to develop the car, like halfway through year
- 7:07four, everyone finishes what they're doing and then you have what they're calling
- 7:12integration hell, where you guess that the brake rotor was gonna be one size and
- 7:17actually it's a different size from that, and now you solution for the suspension
- 7:23doesn't work properly, except it's not.
- 7:25Physical components that we are waiting on here, is it, it's not, it's not like,
- 7:30oh, we're waiting for Brembo to cast us.
- 7:33The brakes.
- 7:33Like what are they gonna do us?
- 7:35Those new chuff D rotors?
- 7:36No, no, it's not that.
- 7:38And that's perhaps what was most depressing about this.
- 7:41Presentation, although it was the, although we talked about cars the
- 7:44whole time, we weren't talking about actual cars and engineering.
- 7:48We weren't talking about the traditional stuff of automotive engineering.
- 7:52We were talking about software, and that's really what we're talking about here.
- 7:56That until the body control people have written their software properly, the
- 8:02HVAC entertainment people can't write their piece of, of software properly.
- 8:10So remote if labs, what we are creating is, uh, virtual bits of
- 8:16infrastructure to allow testing.
- 8:18What this means is that testing can take place much sooner in the cycle.
- 8:23So they have this cool little graphic, which basically, you know, you look at
- 8:26the graphic and you understand completely what it is they're doing, is that they've
- 8:29got all these like silos and all of the silos are working independently
- 8:34to go and create the final car.
- 8:36And this leads to this integration.
- 8:37Hell, well now, because everyone can virtualize what each other are doing, the
- 8:43integration takes place at the beginning.
- 8:45So their integration is super smooth, and they had like a red, jagged graph
- 8:50and then a nice smooth green one.
- 8:52They were, they were Swedish by the way.
- 8:54Um, two sort of middle-aged guys, but both of them.
- 8:59Looking very valley on brand, I would say so, although my age older than than me.
- 9:06Um, they were t-shirts and, and they were trendy genie kind of trousers and,
- 9:11you know, flat canvassy kind of shoes.
- 9:14You know, these dudes, you know, you wouldn't confuse this guy with the CEO
- 9:18with British Steel, you know what I mean?
- 9:20These are not.
- 9:21The traditional people who you would see as suppliers to the automotive industry,
- 9:26although they do very much fit in with, you know, the way that valley people walk
- 9:32and talk, and valley people and all of the car makers have a presence in the valley.
- 9:37And all of these software defined car efforts are, are led by Valley
- 9:41people with this kind of Palo Alto.
- 9:44Aesthetic.
- 9:45I wrote, what is being pitched here is integration testing the path to
- 9:49a product with over the airwaves.
- 9:52Upgrades is shorter and smoother.
- 9:55So I also wrote down that this isn't car way development.
- 9:58It, it's about.
- 10:00Management of a software stack, the it's ECMs, it's GPUs, it's the
- 10:06stuff that Nvidia hasn't bought because you know the crypto miners
- 10:10have got it instead, kind of thing.
- 10:12It's those kind of products that we are needing to virtualize.
- 10:17It is not the sort of suspension and brake components, which I was thinking about.
- 10:22And in fact, at no point.
- 10:23In the presentation, did we talk about anything but might be considered
- 10:28traditional automotive engineering, and I really need to have you sort of stop.
- 10:34And let that sink in to see how completely the car has become a mobile phone.
- 10:40Because even the suspension and the brakes, all of that shit can
- 10:43be controlled by the brain, right?
- 10:46So if you want the car to have better suspension, well it can just move the
- 10:50active ride, you know, different way.
- 10:51And that's how the direction in in which we're going here.
- 10:56Not only are we not talking about those suspension and break and those kind
- 11:01of traditional automotive components, not only are we not talking about
- 11:04them for examples, those things are rather like nuts and bolts.
- 11:10Now, the design of them, it hasn't been perfected, but the design of them is
- 11:15sufficiently well understood that we know that if we want of a particular
- 11:20high quality, we have to pay for an extra kind of alloy and we have to.
- 11:25Pay for it to be machined in a certain way, to have a nice flange
- 11:29on it and to have a hex head on it.
- 11:31Whereas if we don't care, we could just rattle 'em out like they do
- 11:35carpentry nails where they're just cast out of pig iron and they bend.
- 11:40So what?
- 11:41You just chuck it away and have another kind of thing.
- 11:43So that's a sea change that it's the end of cars.
- 11:51As we've known them in the 20th century, right?
- 11:54It's the end of there actually being something to talk about around the
- 12:00business of motivating the card down the road and allowing it to
- 12:05negotiate bumps better or be easier to repair or all, all of that stuff.
- 12:11None of that was remotely considered by these guys.
- 12:16In this presentation, it's all about integration of
- 12:20different software products.
- 12:22So of course what it means is that.
- 12:24Testing in future is gonna involve a blend of actual components and virtual
- 12:32components, and I've been unable to shake this thought at the, since
- 12:38the, in the day since I went to the presentation that the morning before I
- 12:42entered the presentation, I was chatting with somebody about the Mary Rose.
- 12:47If you are English, you'll know what the Mary Rose is.
- 12:50If you're not, you won't.
- 12:52It was King Henry VII's, top quality warship.
- 12:55You know, it was the weapon of mass destruction of the day, and as with so
- 12:59many of things, it had a Titanic like sinking experience because it's made
- 13:05of wood, so it rotted away, right?
- 13:06Anyway.
- 13:07Docks in Southampton.
- 13:10Portsmouth got a new display and the historian that I was chatting to had
- 13:15recently been to it, and he talked about how it was awesome because
- 13:20what they'd done was they'd taken things that were really there, like
- 13:24pewter vases, and then put black plastic where the handle had been.
- 13:31If the handle had gone broken off, they put black plastic on there so
- 13:34you could see what was original.
- 13:36And you could see what they modeled so that you could see what this
- 13:41thing looked like actually in context rather than it just being a crappy
- 13:45piece of meaningless broken pottery.
- 13:48As students used to say to me when we walked around the forum,
- 13:50what's this building site?
- 13:52Yeah, exactly.
- 13:53What's this construction zone?
- 13:54That's what the forum looks like because it's just a piece of broken pottery.
- 13:59They've not thought to contextualize it within its place, not just on a table,
- 14:05not just in a vase, on a table, but on the Merry rose and as part of Henry vii.
- 14:12It's warship and not just as part of Henry VII's warship, but as part of
- 14:17everything that Henry VIII himself symbolized as, you know, the end of the
- 14:22wars of the Roses and what he symbolizes as a, you know, historical figure today.
- 14:27Right?
- 14:27All of those things can come from that one piece of pottery to me.
- 14:34We're in a place where the testing is gonna take place on the fragment of vials.
- 14:40That's the actual thing that each siloed engineering team is working
- 14:45on and their testing environment is going to be completely virtual.
- 14:50This boggles the mind a little bit, right?
- 14:52'cause the whole thing about a test is the, the way things work in
- 14:55theory and the way things work in practice is completely different.
- 14:58And now what we're having is a system of virtual testing.
- 15:03So we're gonna test in a not real world environment, how can that be testing?
- 15:09The whole thing about testing is it takes place in the, in the real world.
- 15:12Well, you say, well, uh, the founder of remote Labs would probably have said,
- 15:16well, this, the, the integration testing would still take place at, at the end.
- 15:22We just allow you to speed up the testing.
- 15:25Process there.
- 15:27So integration testing from day one.
- 15:29You know, I talked about the silos and I talked about the information flowing
- 15:33from the silos straight away rather than, you know, integration testing out of the
- 15:38box, a full integration testing system.
- 15:41So that now we're getting to the stage of, yeah, yeah.
- 15:44All right.
- 15:44I know that, you know, you're gonna fill me up with burger and fries,
- 15:48but when I'm actually at the counter ordering, how does, how does that work?
- 15:52What does the Happy Meal look like?
- 15:54How much is the big back and fries versus the quarter pound?
- 15:57So that all seemed to be in comparison to other software.
- 16:03Define vehicle AI kind of companies.
- 16:06This all seemed more baked, to be honest.
- 16:09Um, I've not been to their website and looked, they only talked about
- 16:12having one client who seemed to be polestar based upon the sample
- 16:16names in, in their presentation.
- 16:18But it does seem like if you approach them.
- 16:22You wouldn't be a prototype site for them.
- 16:25If you approach them and engage them, they have something which is out of the box.
- 16:30And that brings me back to that phrase that I've used a couple of times before.
- 16:34But I find it helpful to think with these kind of mnemonics to get my head around
- 16:38what, what's really happening here.
- 16:40The path to a product with over the airwaves upgrades is shorter and smoother.
- 16:46That's what they're doing.
- 16:47That's what they're trying to do.
- 16:48And the fact that there are so many automotive makers who want that, who
- 16:54that's a compelling problem to be solved for, or the fact that there's anybody
- 16:58out there that these guys feel they're comfortable pitching that message.
- 17:03That is what's interesting.
- 17:04You know, if there's a guy outside a stadium selling hot dogs, he might not
- 17:08be selling any hot dogs, but the fact that he's there says something about
- 17:11the fact that there might be demand.
- 17:13That's what.
- 17:13So wrote here, the traditional automotive engineering is going the
- 17:18way of steam locomotive engineering.
- 17:20I have a biography of Sir Nigel Gresley up on my bookshelf there.
- 17:25And you know, in the first half of the 20th century he was like an Adrian
- 17:28Newey kind of a figure in terms of steam engine design and engineering.
- 17:36Nobody's fucking heard of him now have they?
- 17:38Was my thought.
- 17:39You know, in the Mallard, the steam engine that did 120 miles an hour, I mean.
- 17:45It's an awesome thing, but it's really right back there with
- 17:48the spinning Jenny, isn't it?
- 17:51And it, it was, even when I was a boy growing up, you know, in the seventies and
- 17:54the eighties, you know, the mallard and steam power, it was something of the past.
- 17:59It was already historicized.
- 18:01Right.
- 18:01And that's why I'm using that, that example because you know, well it's
- 18:06like a Lamar winning car, isn't it?
- 18:07No.
- 18:07Or a Formula One car no longer does it win it.
- 18:10No sooner does it win its last race, then it immediately becomes a museum
- 18:14piece and the technology moves on and, and I suppose I hadn't anticipated
- 18:21as part of this software defined car revolution that we were gonna lose.
- 18:25People like Adrian Newey, there were gonna be no Adrian Newey in the
- 18:29future because those kind of brains just weren't gonna be interested in
- 18:32designing cars because we've done that just like the zeitgeist has moved on.
- 18:38And a brilliant brain like son Nigel Gresley would not have been involved in.
- 18:43I hope I've made my point there.
- 18:47One interesting thing that he did say, and, and this is an interesting facet
- 18:52of these presentations, is that quite often the most interesting part of the
- 18:57evening are the question, but quite often I would say for every one question that's
- 19:02really compelling and leads to a pearl of wisdom that makes you really glad
- 19:07that you came, that pearl alone would've been worth the evening out of the house.
- 19:11Kind of that's offset by the fact that.
- 19:14Uh, maybe it's the engineering audience, although I find the same happens with
- 19:17historians and social scientists, but somebody takes you down this boring
- 19:22rat hole and I just chewed out and I can find it hard to tune back in.
- 19:27Even if the presenter's answer is, is a compelling one.
- 19:30But one point that he made was the Westerners like bespoke
- 19:37performance solutions, whereas.
- 19:40Chinese engineers will make do with.
- 19:44Off the shelf components and we'll integrate that.
- 19:48And I think that's a really interesting philosophy.
- 19:52Now I am replaying it.
- 19:54I wonder if, if you listen to the presentation that I did with lio that
- 19:59was about the history of Leadar or looked at, you know, where we are with our
- 20:04development or where we were, you know, 18 months ago or whenever I, whenever I
- 20:07went to that, I was struck there by how.
- 20:11The Leadar developers were all in bed with one particular German company, and
- 20:16it made me wonder how political Tesla's public rejection of Leadar was and how
- 20:22the German's embrace of Leadar was perhaps a, you know, less about the technology
- 20:27and more as desperate attempt to give themselves some differentiation from
- 20:31this aggressive new player in the market.
- 20:34It's a very cynical thought, but now I've said it out loud again.
- 20:38Feel that it's really not unlikely that that's the case, especially given that,
- 20:44you know, German autonomous cars are meant to operate at 150 miles an hour.
- 20:49You know, a much higher level of veracity.
- 20:54If that's the right word.
- 20:55It's not, they basically have to have, be high quality, just like
- 20:58an A MG Benz is designed to do 150 miles an hour on the autobar with
- 21:03five people and their luggage in it.
- 21:05Other cars aren't designed to that kind of standard.
- 21:08The same thing's going on here, I think perhaps with Leadar design, so
- 21:13perhaps that's why Westerners like.
- 21:17Bespoke performance solutions and the Chinese are, you know, more ready to make
- 21:23do, maybe it's not a cultural thing, maybe it's a price point and marketing thing.
- 21:28Maybe Stellantis are gonna be doing something which is more, you
- 21:32know, off the shelf and integrate.
- 21:34Although interestingly, I do remember the Val guy saying that Stellantis.
- 21:40Wanted to take all of their, if you like, the firmware, remember if you
- 21:43listed their Leadar presentation, they were like, some people just
- 21:47want to take the Leadar device.
- 21:50Other people want to take the Leadar device, the hardware,
- 21:53but they also want to take our.
- 21:55Kind of bespoke software.
- 21:58Our, our like firmware almost, or our interpreter.
- 22:02In other words, we got some stuff programmed in that.
- 22:05Let you say like, if it's got small and four legs, it's a dog.
- 22:08If it's large and four legs, it's a cow.
- 22:11If it's, you know, got two wheels, it's a bicycle.
- 22:14So in other words, your device, your ai, you know, your ECM doesn't need to have
- 22:19the horsepower because we are already doing some pre interpretation for it.
- 22:25If that makes sense.
- 22:27I'm not sure how clear my point here is is, but I suppose what I'm trying to
- 22:31say is that traditionally the Germans used to charge more for a premium
- 22:36product because it drove better, right?
- 22:38It, it was better to sit in, it went around corners better, accelerated faster.
- 22:43It had a high top speed.
- 22:44You know, when you were on the freeway it was quieter.
- 22:47You know, there were those kind of very ta.
- 22:49There were those kind of.
- 22:50Of reasons and the whole, the whole world of car magazines and journalism and what
- 22:55was a good car and what was a bad car, and what impressed people in the company
- 23:00car park and all of that stuff was all wrapped up with that kind of performance.
- 23:05And I, I wonder if.
- 23:07The Germans aren't trying to do the same thing with their techno functionality.
- 23:13I mean, BMW definitely seem to be, don't they?
- 23:15Perhaps, uh, perhaps it's a statement of the obvious.
- 23:17Perhaps that's what they are trying to do, and perhaps the motive guy
- 23:21by saying Westerners like bespoke performance solutions and, and the
- 23:25Chinese are more happy to make, do with off the shelf solutions and integrate.
- 23:30Perhaps that's just a different way of, of saying that.
- 23:37One question was about what actually is spat out of a simulation?
- 23:42So what kind of rapport was it?
- 23:44I can't remember what the answer was, but I, I just thought that illustrates
- 23:50that kind of a, I'm at the counter, I've ordered a burger and fries.
- 23:55When the burger and fries come, what do they look like?
- 23:57You know?
- 23:58Am I getting a tray?
- 24:00Is it wrapped?
- 24:00Am I gonna need a napkin?
- 24:02Am I, you know, that's the stage that the audience are at
- 24:07with this kind of technology.
- 24:08They're not blown away by the concept of this.
- 24:12They're like, no, no.
- 24:13I, I, I get the burger and fries.
- 24:15I get the fast food.
- 24:16You know, I get that.
- 24:18I, I'm interested in whether or not there's gerkin and
- 24:21is the coffee free or not?
- 24:22That's where the audience were thinking.
- 24:29So I think the final point that came out of the questioning was
- 24:34from like an old coup at the front.
- 24:36And you've gotta believe when you go to one of these events
- 24:38in Silicon Valley, some old coup wearing a hoodie at the front.
- 24:41I mean, he could be a partner, uh, a Silicon Valley VC firm.
- 24:46'cause the VC guys, if, if, if you don't know the way Silicon Valley's
- 24:50laid out, if you've come from like the city, London, or you know, any kind
- 24:55of a European financial center, it's.
- 24:57Kind of weird.
- 24:58Firstly, because the valley's all like low rise.
- 25:01And secondly, when you realize that not only is Stanford the model for all the
- 25:06tech campuses, so all the tech campuses feel like Stanford's campus, which is
- 25:11a bit weird because it means that all of these people who like left Stanford
- 25:15and went to Google or left Stanford and went to Apple, they went from one
- 25:18place where they worked with a bunch of people who were exactly like them.
- 25:22Riding round on bikes at a really nice campus to another place
- 25:25that looked exactly like that.
- 25:27And the only difference was how much you got.
- 25:28I mean, Berkeley's not like that.
- 25:30Berkeley felt like Leeds.
- 25:31It felt like a gritty educational institution that had been
- 25:36there for a hundred years.
- 25:37Stanford does not feel that way at all, and one of the weirdnesses of Stanford
- 25:43is the road connecting it to the freeway.
- 25:47Is venture capital central or the venture capital firms that you've heard of in
- 25:53association with funding, either early stage startups or late stage ones?
- 25:58They're all right there.
- 26:00On that drag, it's a bit like the first time you work the city of
- 26:02London and you realize that you really can do one meeting and it
- 26:07really is just gonna be five minutes round the corner to another meeting.
- 26:10So you can literally book meetings every hour and not be laid.
- 26:15The question this older bloke in a hoodie asked was, um, around
- 26:22what actually is the main.
- 26:25I can't remember how he framed it, but basically he was like, what's the
- 26:28biggest cock block to getting adopt?
- 26:30And they said political resistance within the organization.
- 26:35And he said, you know, because it's such a revolutionary approach, but if
- 26:38you just stop and think about that, that is a total showstopper, isn't it?
- 26:44Because at the moment if the head of silo A, the head of Silo B and the head of Silo
- 26:49C, they might have gripes with each other.
- 26:53But they each have their own process, which they've been following
- 26:59and has been working just fine.
- 27:01And when you rock up and say, yeah, now you guys are gonna
- 27:04have to share from the beginning.
- 27:05So that means that right from the start, I'm trying to design my brake rotor.
- 27:10But I've gotta have meetings with you so that I get some idea of what your
- 27:14suspension looks like so that I can already begin integration testing.
- 27:19I mean, it just feels like, you know, we, we had a process that was working and
- 27:23now you've come along and changed it all.
- 27:25And I think the, that for me was a reminder of what it's like to actually
- 27:31sell these kind of software products.
- 27:33Is that.
- 27:34In the kind of safe environment of that kind of presentation, the
- 27:40concept seems awesome, revolutionary compelling, but when you actually meet
- 27:47the reality of those three silos now, or having to work together and work
- 27:53in a completely different way, I feel like whatever efficiencies you might
- 27:58gain could easily be lost in like the re-imagining of the whole process.
- 28:03And certainly there would be significant productivity losses, you know, as
- 28:09ever, whether there is in these kind of software products, in the actual
- 28:12integration and training and setup and persuading people to use itness of it all.
- 28:19So to conclude, these remote guys seemed to have a product which was
- 28:23highly baked, and it definitely seemed to have a need, which.
- 28:28Was developed well based upon the questions that were asked.
- 28:33You know, the people asking questions, they weren't being like,
- 28:37well, is it even gonna fill me up?
- 28:39They were asking questions like, I, I want fries with that.
- 28:42When's the McFlurry coming?
- 28:44You know, those were the kind of questions that the audience were asking, but.
- 28:50You've still got this like hugely disruptive kind of process.
- 28:56So you know, for me, if I put my software sales guy hat on for the next
- 29:02interview, I would've really wanted to talk to some customers and I would've
- 29:07really wanted a warm feel that they weren't just in bed with one company.
- 29:11Because that was my worry that the, and I, I should go to their website and have
- 29:15a look around, and I might be misleading you with this, but you know, you don't
- 29:19want a situation where they're only in bed with one company and they're completely
- 29:24in lockstep with what they're doing.
- 29:26So you, as a sales person, you can't really sell the product to
- 29:29anybody else because it's like left handed scissors, you know, only
- 29:33works for 10% of the population.
- 29:35Thank you.
- 29:36Drive through.
- 29:47This episode has been brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports as part
- 29:51of our Motoring Podcast network.
- 29:53For more episodes like this, tune in each week for more exciting and educational
- 29:57content from organizations like The Exotic Car Marketplace, the Motoring
- 30:00Historian, break Fixx, and many others.
- 30:03If you'd like to support Grand Touring Motor Sports and the Motoring
- 30:05Podcast Network, sign up for one of our many sponsorship tiers at
- 30:09www.patreon.com/gt Motorsports.
- 30:14Please note that the content, opinions and materials presented and
- 30:17expressed in this episode are those of its creator, and this episode has
- 30:20been published with their consent.
- 30:22If you have any inquiries about this program, please contact the creators
- 30:25of this episode via email or social media as mentioned in the episode.