From what I know of the car industry, coding standards are very low. I don't think any car companies would look good if their code was audited by professional software engineers in other fields.
Then you don't know the motor industry very much as it has very strict coding standards like ISO 26262, the code has to be audited internally and by certified 3rd parties with every release to meet the development cycle requirements of the standards.
The industry also has specific coding standard for every language that is used in embedded systems like MISRA-C
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MISRA_C
Today every thing you do with your car from using breaks to deploying air-bags is done through the computer, there's no way in hell that the motor industry would be releasing poor code "intentionally" because it would cost them billions in liabilities.
And you're not familiar with what happened when a 3rd party (Michael Barr) was allowed to FINALLY look inside Toyota's engine code and determine the cause of the "Unintended Acceleration" problem:
"Barr checked the [Toyota] source code against MISRA’s 2004 edition and found 81,514 violations."
The model year 2005 Camry in question from the trial would have been made available in 2004, and the electronic throttle control system was designed prior to 2004 (IIRC, the ETC design was carried forward from the previous model). How does it makes sense to apply MISRA-C:2004 in this case, especially when the Toyota ETC in question was admittedly not designed under MISRA-C:2004 nor prior MISRA-C revisions?
It is inaccurate to claim Michael Barr determined the cause of Toyota's unintended acceleration: he proposed a possible failure mode that was persuasive to a lay jury. His proposed failure mode didn't leave a DTC, so there's no way to actually know if his proposed failure mode actually happened in this case (or in any other).
I remember when this was posted on HN before, what I always wondered about is the discrepancy between the violations that NASA found and Barr.
NASA found 7000 and change Barr found over 81,000, I'm not sure whats the size of the code that was reviewed but that's allot, even if you count the fact that half of them might be silly like naming convention violations that still leaves quite an odd number for actual violations especially when considering that the code for an embedded system can't be that huge.
And the 10,000 global variables thing, well 10,000 sounds like a huge number but there wasn't any mention if they were a) necessary, b) implemented correctly, and c) out of how many variables in total? if the code they've tested has say 1 million variables then well....
And how they described global variables is also weird, they claimed that every software within the system can access them to me this sounds that your stereo or the rain sensor for the wipers can override data for the breaks, but that might be true only if everything is running within a single application.
If the breaks run as an independent application well then only every function within the break software (depending on the language and how global variables are implemented) could potentially access those variables.
To me pretty much that entire explanation seem to be constructed to sound worse than what it is, which is why I think that expert witnesses should only be allowed to be appointed and called by the court it self (as in by the judge so they and the jury could understand the technical details better) and not by either the defense or the prosecution.
And 2 of my friends worked for BetterPlace (RIP) and it took years for Nissan to accept the code which had to be rewritten to comply and certified by an external 3rd party.
And that code wasn't even "mission critical" in terms of road safety.
I have seen both very good code and very bad code. Standards are in place for making it good but it really depends the most on who's implementing it and the SW team culture.