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This is so often missed by people in the auto industry, I am glad he is saying something. But this is not just limited to vehicle components within hardware of cars; this also will also often apply to the companies entire tech stack. By this I mean vehicle ordering systems, parts management systems, dealer systems... etc.

The auto industry for years has had a "Vendor Solution" problem which has created insurmountable software and hardware tech debt or dependencies. Some manufactures are using systems dating back to the 90's in production. Companies will deploy newer better DB's and never migrate off the old solutions and this leap frog happens multiple times so you have 3 or 4 "Generations" old infra. Most of this is the result of farming out or contracting vendors to build a system, deploy a system, and it just stays. After which all of the knowledge vanishes about how it was built, then business owners want updates and no one know how to, so its farmed out to figure out how to fix it... this cost $$$ and time, there is scope creep, and the cycle repeats.

This is starting to change, but Farley's right in describing this is a HUGE problem the public doesn't really see beyond just the vehicle systems. If you are unsure if this is true, this is why the CDK Global hack essentially froze all vehicle sales and dealer pay, CDK is a huge DMS (Dealer Management Systems) provider that dealers pay to do their parts and sales systems.

It was profitable to do this in the 90's, 2000's, and 2010's due to globalization and smaller digital foot printing, but that has all changed with IOT, Smarter sensors and controllers, and consumer & CEO expectations of product advancements.