[aibrahem]

As someone who spent almost half his career as a software engineer in automotive companies and the other half in a couple of large tech companies, I could completely understand why there is a high chance of this happening.

Most automotive companies are run like factories, including the hardware, software, and R&D departments, in a factory, the focus is more on the process than on achieving the “correct” results, which although might work great in a factory could be extremely hampering for innovation in development and technology teams.

If you ever wonder why infotainment systems in most cars are stuck in the 90’s UI it’s because it would take weeks to change a single line of code where it would need to go through multiple code reviews, get approved by people who’ve been using the same development tools for the last 20 years and consider IBM RTC as cutting edge, document every single thought that went through the developers head and mindlessly test the crap out of every possible combination.

The way tech companies operate is extremely data-driven, if it works and you have the data to back it up that is usually the end of the discussion. However, in process-oriented companies conformance to the established processes is what is usually valued, a statement that is usually echoed is that it’s more important to follow the process and produce incorrect results than not follow it and produce correct results.

For the last decades, automotive OEM’s have been bringing manufacturing processes to software development, my hope is that any tech company (and Tesla being one of them) would be able to bring agile software development practices to manufacturing.