One problem for legacy car makers has been that for the longest time they relied on their suppliers to deliver ECUs. Integration was through config settings and the car maker didn’t have access to the ECU code. Each vendor had their own software update mechanism. Car makers were just glorified systems integrators.
Now, customers expect a single, unified experience and a clean, trouble-free software update that fixes bugs and delivers new features. You can’t do that if you’re just plugging black-boxes into each other.
From the suppliers point of view, there is currently chaos. Every OEMs has very unique requirements and it is not feasible to offer scaling products. That means high costs for the OEMs because more stuff is custom-built.
OEMs handle this very differently. Some try to pull things in-house (Ford FNV4, VW CARIAD) but now find out that it is too costly. Others try make suppliers collaborate more closely (Continuous Integration!) but find out that the old patterns (plugging black-boxes) prevail.
I imagine all the big OEM managers are quite frustrated now because nothing seems to work. Meanwhile the “new kids” wonder why they struggle.
Fascinating article. Thank you for posting it!