[constantcrying]

>produced by a company culture that just won't change as it just doesn't see value in this

I don't think that is the real problem. The issue is that Volkswagen has always been a hardware company and you can not make hardware like you do software. Fast iterations are not possible in hardware, so you need a careful long iterative process to fix previous problems and produce improved designs. Implementing a software process into this can only lead to disaster.

They also know that this is a major problem, which is why they founded Cariad to develop software, but that got burdened by the same problems.

Also: compared to the US, software engineering is payed terrible in the EU. If you are writing software you don't get payed more than an engineer.