[ryandrake]

If you've ever worked at a company whose bread and butter is hardware, you know many of them treat software like just some other line item on the BOM: Like a screw or nut that needs to be as cheap as possible and "meet the spec", however insufficiently defined that spec is. I'd be willing to bet that this attitude is what's ultimately behind crappy software in cars. They don't see software as value-add, they see it as a cost that they grudgingly must eat in order to barely compete with the other car companies who also have crappy software. Yet, these companies who are so bad at software, and obviously hate it, keep adding more and more of it into their products!

It was a lot better when you could just ignore the bad software and use your phone for navigation/music. Now you need to use the bad software to operate more and more essential things in the car. What's next? A big screen in front of your face with a 10FPS animation of a steering wheel that you have to drag around with your finger to steer?