These are companies that might never treat "software" as a core part of the product, and mostly manage it as a cost center.

The fact that VW invests in Rivian so it can potentially "use" its software is pretty telling in my opinion.

It's hard for companies to change that though. I think Apple did it well. AMD still needs to do it fully.

>These are companies that might never treat "software" as a core part of the product, and mostly manage it as a cost center.

VW definitely does not believe that Software is unimportant or not a core part of the product.

They even tried to make their own software company to fix their inability to do software right.

As a VW EV owner (ID.4), I can attest to this. The software is a burning dumpster fire, usability is terrible, the most common workflows break or simply never work, the car forgets even basic settings like whether you want to charge to 80% or 100%, and even the bare basics like the windows going predictably up when you press both "up" buttons sometimes fail (race conditions, apparently). It's an absolute disgrace.

I think any other vendor's software is better than this.

We drive an ID.5. Apart from the UX, the outdated visual design language – is the interface also horrendously slow in yours? I have very noticeable lag when interacting with it, sometimes it takes even a second to respond to input.

If it weren't for the insanely good driving experience (coming from a VW Polo before), the software would have definitely convinced us to go for another car.

> is the interface also horrendously slow in yours

Yes. But I consider this to be the least of its problems — if it were slow, but actually worked, I'd be OK with it. The problem is that it is quite simply broken in a number of ways.

It looks as if no management at VW ever used the car. It should be mandatory for management to use any new car design as their home/family car for a month or so. I'd imagine some problems would be fixed in no time. Things like the car forgetting charging settings, the car being unable to link driver profiles to key fobs (!) and distinguish between drivers, the fact that some settings are per-driver, while others are per-car, or the fact that the phone app doesn't display any useful information, especially if you have two drivers. I mean, I could go on and on. It's mind-boggling that software of this quality has ever been released.

Probably designed with ITIL processes and UML diagrams. That sort of thing is popular in Germany.