“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” said Charles Poon, VP of vehicle hardware engineering, in a briefing this week with reporters.
Well, it’s complicated. Basically my team has done this sort of work for a long time, but for a different market segment. This is a new market segment, but with respect to our work it acts the same. However executives don’t understand that, so they spun up another organization to deal. Further, the company that was supposed to do it instead of us had brand recognition in the market despite being terrible at the part of the work that we know how to do.
So we weren’t being replaced, we were seen as not relevant to this “new” market. That vendor wasn’t going to touch our market with a thousand foot pole.
What we seem to be settling into is for us to do it our usual way, then hand over to that revered company to finish it in a way to cash in on brand recognition and admittedly do things a bit more particular for that market after our usual jobs are done.