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Comparing Tesla, Ford, & VW's Electrical Architectures

6 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this interview1 month2021 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN recommends it as a fair, technical comparison and cites it when discussing why legacy automakers have more boxes and complexity than Tesla.

Sandy Munro sits down with engineers from 3IS to compare the electrical architectures of the Tesla Model Y, Ford Mach-E and VW ID.4. They discuss ECU counts, bus architectures and what the differences mean for cost and integration.

“I'm not a Tesla fanboy but I didn't think it was biased.” (HN, 2021)

1 recommendations · 2 citations · Interviews · intermediate · partly dated

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@DyslexicAtheist May 2021 Recommends
on HN thread Comparing Tesla, Ford and VW’s Electrical Architectures [video]
Read more
I'm not a Tesla fanboy but I didn't think it was biased. E.g.: Right off the bat he talks about the number of ECU[1] of Tesla compared to others. He points out that this will result in inferior quality due to the number of connections. A no-brainer with cascading effects which has many other advantages for Tesla[2]. Spelling this out will upset a lot of people because it's a valid attack that also knocks the other designs into a corner that makes one wonder what's the point of even continuing. (at least if one expects a ranking on quality etc - then there is no recovering from that). The missing CAN-FD[3] bus-speed info on Tesla is interesting. It seems Tesla is doing it's own thing here with CAN-FD. Maybe a proprietary implementation (I couldn't make sense of it)? The other connections like Ethernet, LIN etc are also much less and I'm assuming this can be attributed to simply having such a small number of ECU's too. No idea what's going on with the missing OBD-II but I'd imagine if you want to roll out a proprietary after-market technology that can only be serviced at a Tesla shop then killing this makes sense in order to lock everyone in (customers but more relevant after-sales). Tesla Y has no replaceable fuses, ... and it goes on ... and on ... As a piston/gear-head who hates the brand, and strongly dislikes Musk it's a lot to digest and put up with. I don't understand though why the video is supposed to be biased or not accurate. It doesn't seem they're releasing any inf
Fair comparison of ECU counts and bus architectures

Citations, criticism and jokes

@Gravityloss Sep 2021 Cites it
on HN thread Supply Chain Shortages Continue Around the World. Get Used to It
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I think it's the same with everything like agile software development etc. There are some ideas with some good parts, but the way people end up applying them can cause a lot of problems. People should understand the domain, do risk analysis, change management etc. For example car companies are suffering from chip shortages. Maybe they should have stockpiled more? But on the other hand, the "parts bin" is the worst obstacle preventing innovation and integration in established manufacturers. Why do new companies like Tesla have way less electronic parts while legacy manufacturers have lots of separate boxes and wiring, all reducing reliability, increasing cost, space and mass. Because for a legacy manufacturer it makes more sense to use the same parts from the "parts bin" as for their previous model - it's just cheaper and faster, the supply chain already exists. [this video]
Legacy parts-bin reuse leads to many separate boxes
@gotmedium Oct 2021 Cites it
on HN thread Tesla Q3 2021 Earnings
* >and was quite a bit cheaper* There are reasons why your ID.4 is cheaper than the others (and it always boils down to quality of the parts). Take a look at this Tesla, Ford, & VW's Electrical Architectures for instance. There are other tear-downs that can confirm [this video]
Teardown comparing electrical architectures of Tesla, Ford and VW

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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