[HeyLaughingBoy]

Not just the owners, but the other engineers.

I have never worked in the auto industry, but I was an embedded software engineer at an F500 company that loved to just throw hardware "over the wall" to the SW engineers.

I had come from a very small company and working like this made no sense to me. After a particularly annoying discovery I was talking to one of the EE's and he explained it to me. "You see, the guy who designed that controller knows nothing about software. He just has a list of specs to meet, and he gets a processor, wires a bunch of peripherals to it, and releases a circuit board. If you're lucky, the SW guy who sat in the design reviews made sure to get a good enough processor to make your job easier. If not, you're SOL because as long as the hardware meets all the requirements they gave him, no one is going to want to change anything."

In this case, the engineer was incentivized to save a whopping $0.50 on a machine that cost around $2,000 to build. And for lack of that $.50 part, software spent hundreds of hours adding code to find a way to implement the behavior that it would have provided. Not to mention all the Test hours needed to verify that it worked as expected.

Paradoxically, I also saw the opposite behavior on the same project: people adding extremely complex hardware to solve simple problems because the company paid very well for patents, so of course everyone had an incentive to produce patentable designs.