My new Electric Car and how it resembles the Hardware and Software divide
For most products it’s a useful experiment to analyse the user experience in two separate camps: hardware and software.
Often, one is much better than the other.
As I argued, we witness a seismic shift: While products of the past came with no or very little digital part, every new product nowadays comes with a significant digital part. Even selling a wooden block would benefit greatly from e.g. free Social Media distribution.
Humankind had thousands of years getting good at hardware — software is relatively new. That’s why companies who can do software are in general more in demand than those who can do hardware.
For example, Tesla has clearly some homework left with its hardware — but apparently this doesn’t matter when the overall experience, driven by software and its integration, is that much better. People who are in the market and are sitting out a Tesla, are the exact same group of people who sat out the first iPhone because the battery (hardware) didn’t last two days.
A company that can integrate good hardware with equally good software, at scale? We’re talking about the trifecta unicorn.
Even the most valuable company in the world, Apple, is struggling with software. Or at least it makes greater leaps with their hardware, see the iPad or the M1 chips.
Why do I reiterate this again? Since 2 months I’m the owner of an Opel Corsa-e, a fully electric vehicle made by one of Europe’s car incumbents, which shows the divide clearly.
In case you want the full details, here’s a list of unforced (as far as I know) UX issues (feel free to skip to the conclusion).
Battery & Range
Because of its high efficiency, range of an EV can vary drastically. I would drive in the so called ‘Sports’ mode (crazy torque) more often if it wouldn’t drain the battery as fast. What didn’t matter as much before — like weather or altitude, is suddenly becoming important.
In general, when a thing is very volatile, it makes sense to get a larger buffer to bolster spikes. The opposite is true in electric cars, ranges are shorter. It doesn’t help that range estimates are tested with ‘californian’ conditions.
Just like with smartphone or laptop batteries, they hold longer if your charging cycles are only between 20% to 80%, which means unplugging before the car is fully charged. If you follow that the maximum range gets shorter.
This all would be tolerable if the onboard computer would calculate the remaining range in a reassuring manner. After all the computer could know the current and future weather conditions, if I’m normally driving to work right now, how my driving style translates, and so on. None of that seems to be taken into account. I can’t rely on the range estimate shown. Even the simple question: “If I continue to drive like the last 5 minutes, how far will I come?” stays unanswered.
So you resort to look at the SoC (State of Charge) and subtract a few percentage points for the current route out of operating experience.
If only the car would show percentages. The only thing I’ve got are 8 bars. One of them equals 12.5%. Yes, driving the Corsa-e makes you better at math.
(Same is true for charging. I can’t see how many kWh are getting pumped into the car. I just see “Charging 14 km per hour”.)
On board computer & Updates
I don’t have much to gripe about the infotainment system, because on a day-to-day basis I never use it. Android Auto or iOS Carplay outsource this part to the smartphone, luckily.
Sometimes it’s not starting on the first try, though. Unplugging and plugging the phone back in usually helps.
But let’s look beyond Android Auto. Cars are becoming more like software programs. And just like with software programs, settings and options are important. For example I would like to set the strength of the B mode. But the amount of fine-grained control is very limited in my model (don’t get me started on the bundle philosophy of cars).
When I found a rare settings dialog, it’s not even clear if that applies to my vehicle. Features can be set, but have no consequence.
That’s because the feature is turned off only by software. I hate this approach, because I feel somehow cheated. It would cost nothing to enable it.
Immediately after the first drive the app told me that there’s an update for the infotainment system available.
- I had to email myself more info.
- The real instructions were linked in the mail. The link was 404. With forum help, I found the instructions for a similar Peugeot.
- I had to download 7 GB and a separate license file.
- I had to erase the USB stick with a certain file system.
- I had to place the license file in a specific folder inside the other content.
- I had to plug the drive into my car and after only 40 minutes while the car was on, it was done.
To this day, I can’t name what has changed. But at least I didn’t had to make an appointment at my local dealer with a LIFO principle in place.
Yes, that’s why OTA updates are important.
Gears & Shift knob
There are three options to activate the hand brake. Button on the left side of the shift knob, separate button, stopping the engine. I have never in my live had to activate the hand brake while the engine was running. So two out of three options are useless to me.
You can decide if you want to drive in D mode (feels like a gasoline car) or in B (with advanced energy recovery).
B is unfortunately not really made for one-pedal driving. You will still need to use the brake pedal in sharp turns.
When I stop in front of a red light, I want the car to not move, even if I lift the brake pedal again (Start Stop system). But no, once I lift my foot, the car starts rolling.
I use the B mode for cities and the D mode for highways because that’s the energy efficient way. What I would like to have is an automatic switch at ~60 km/h.
If that would be the case, and if R would be a button somewhere else, I wouldn’t need the whole shift knob. Think about the room that would be made free.
This is the downside when you take an existing gasoline car and retrofit it with batteries.
Intelligence systems
Costs are the main reason I didn’t opt-in for the Corsa’s autonomous driving assistant. The bigger reason may be that I heard that it isn’t very intelligent.
The whole self-driving thing is pretty funny: Some see it already implemented, some are very skeptical.
I don’t know if Tesla will be first and I think they are extremely overvalued as of right now. But still, sometimes ambition (and the lack of ambition from others) make the difference.
When Daimler says “Waymo is full of IT specialists”, the implication is that they are not. How can you compete when cars are full of code, apart from the buzz around self-driving? Don’t you need a software culture for everything remotely intelligent, too?
Regarding the cockpit display:
- Cruise control can be enabled at 40 km/h or higher. German villages have a 30 km/h speed limit.
- The speed indicator is digital and only updated every second or so. This has two effects: I only know how fast I’m driving with a certain lag and the car feels slower than it has to.
The crown maybe takes the MyOpel app. I can do two things. Turn the air con on (when the car is charged over 50%) and see the the location & battery status. The app is extremely sluggish and usually takes a minute and several tries to submit a command to the car. The moment you want to view past drives, it reliably crashes. Lots of Play Store commentators can confirm.
Charging & Navigation
I’m reluctant to take the european charging station infrastructure into account — on the one side it’s not the fault of car manufacturers, on the other side they are in the game of enabling driving experiences, and with EV’s, charging is a great chunk of the experience. (Maybe that’s what people are missing who don’t see any disruptive potential in Tesla.)
Granted, besides Tesla, Audi and recently Fiat showed onboard navigations that take the current SoC into account and route to charging stations in between point A and B.
Everyone else: Either you plan and research charging stops beforehand, or you hack your way with dongles, API keys, software reboots, etc..
Charging speeds vary a lot. If you want to drive longer distances, choose high charging speeds. But — and this is a bit misleading — car makers only tell you the time it takes to go from 0% to 80%. Because the charging curve decreases significantly over time.
I bet car makers are reducing speeds cautiously to play it safe — they fear to have to replace batteries often.
Charging cables and adapters are a mess, too. Opel’s “Universal Charger” is chipped away so that you can’t get the whole potential from a standard energy outlet. The same is true for the Typ 2 cable. Surprise, by placing a simple magnet on the cable it works.
Conclusion
I’m a Product Owner, I can read some code, I can’t write code. But I’m confident that I could solve some of the issues mentioned above by hunting e.g. the 40 km/h limiter in the code and replacing the variable.
Anyway, I wouldn’t recommend an electric car if you can’t charge at home over night or if you want to drive on vacation with it.
I’m not unhappy with my purchase, I like being an early adopter. It’s incredibly fun to drive an EV. The Corsa-e is certainly not the worst ever made, it achieved very good reviews. To use the distinction from above: The hardware is fine.
But please go into the buying decision with open eyes, the salesman won’t tell the full story — not because he’s hiding something, just because he hasn’t driven a car like that himself and doesn’t know any better.
I was one of those nerds who had a smartphone before the iPhone. With my Nokia N70 and the first UMTS flat I strolled through the city centre and had to tell everyone how fabulous Google Maps on the go is.
Let’s say (and this is debatable) EV’s will do to fuel cars what the smartphone did to mobile phones.
According to Wikipedia the market share of electric cars (incl. plug-in hybrid) was 2.5% in 2019. Then we’re in ~2005, pre-iPhone.
In 2006 the share of smartphones shipped was roughly 6.4%. Apple entered the market in Q3 2007 — as with other products it was considered late.
In other words, if Apple were a carmaker they would’t have an EV in their lineup as of today.
I’m not saying that European carmakers are Apple in that analogy. Rather that the real breakthrough may still be on the horizon. The S curve is just beginning.
