The car is a complicated product. It’s not a website. It’s not an app. My employer has 120k+ employees and factories in every continent except Antarctica. Regulatory bodies interject with anything related to access and security, and those bodies are different in every country/region. The product itself is massive physical good that many countries consider domestic production of which to be a matter of national security. Every single physical change to the product is analyzed by bean counters. Shipping the product requires at least some level of expertise in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, hardware, software, and manufacturing. You need factories, regulatory approval, supplier networks, programmers, drivetrain engineers, management, people to lobby the government, accountants, and much more. You need it all.
You’d be shocked at how difficult adding a single physical button to any given car can be. Scoffing at $1.2mm for a new ECU that relates to security is naive. “I could do this in one day in my garage” is not how shipping a change to automotive products works.
The car is a complicated product. It’s not a website. It’s not an app. My employer has 120k+ employees and factories in every continent except Antarctica. Regulatory bodies interject with anything related to access and security, and those bodies are different in every country/region. The product itself is massive physical good that many countries consider domestic production of which to be a matter of national security. Every single physical change to the product is analyzed by bean counters. Shipping the product requires at least some level of expertise in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, hardware, software, and manufacturing. You need factories, regulatory approval, supplier networks, programmers, drivetrain engineers, management, people to lobby the government, accountants, and much more. You need it all.
You’d be shocked at how difficult adding a single physical button to any given car can be. Scoffing at $1.2mm for a new ECU that relates to security is naive. “I could do this in one day in my garage” is not how shipping a change to automotive products works.