Monday, January 23, 2017

Tesla Cars To Have ‘Major Revisions’ Every 12-18 Months

Link to Full Article

Highlights:

Traditional car companies generally offer incremental improvements in the next-in-line version of an existing car. For example, while Ford has been incrementally improving its Mustang since 1963, the car still espouses a design philosophy similar to the original.

According to Musk’s tweets, there are unlikely to be any retrofits — i.e. your old Tesla car’s hardware would not be upgraded to make it come to par with the new version of the car, even if you are willing to pay for the same.


Here's the real sticking point: These auto companies, and auto component manufacturers, use long lived platforms as a way to spread design costs out over time, and also, to do the long term validation work that it takes to not produce rolling piles of unsafe junk.

We will see what happens.

Thursday, January 19, 2017

The Root Causes of Anything

I'm working on a book about failure. My motto of the moment is: One person's failure is another person's revenue stream.

I found this chart in a presentation "Human Factors in Aviation" which is a summary of 86 aircraft disasters in North America by David J. Taylor

Complete Article


Causes/ major contributory factor
% of accidents in which this was a factor                   
Pilot deviated from basic operational procedures
33
Inadequate cross-check by second crew member
26
Design faults
13
Maintenance and inspection deficiencies
12
Absence of approach guidance
10
Captain ignored crew inputs                                     
10
Air traffic control failures or errors                  
9
Improper crew response during abnormal conditions
9
Insufficient or incorrect weather information
8
Runway hazards
7
Air traffic control/crew communication deficiencies
6
Improper decision to land
6


So is it not clear that these can be grouped into five groups? Human, Procedural, Mechanical, and Environmental, with a side order of Detection Issues?

And of all of these do they not boil down to human, at some point?