Rinse and repeat across hundreds of components and your team "pays for itself"

"We found $X cost savings" is the easiest path the promotion. It's measurable, cleanly attributable, and immediate, while the downsides are not. Maybe perform is bad bc they skimped on memory, or maybe it's because the software team sucks. Maybe it means future updates are hamstrung, but who cares the bonus checks cleared years ago. Besides, you probably got promoted to a bigger / better role by now, and who can remember who decided what when?

And with the help of software your get: this algorithm works well to recognize signs using 2 cameras. We can alter it a little to make it work with 1 camera (huge savings) and losing like 10% accuracy. With a cheaper camera we lose again some accuracy but even more savings.

Now you get a shitty feature for savings while the people who implemented it can go cry in a corner thinking about their good version.

"We asked one of the software guys if we 'could' use a single camera, and they said, 'uh... possibly?', so we pushed through!"

That is one component in one model. Car makers have several models with maybe hundreds (or thousands?) of electrical components. Plus "cost-saving" has always been a surefire way of ensuring bonus.

It’s very obviously a rhetorical exaggeration.

Yes sometimes it’s a dollar or two and it really adds up quick. Sometimes 10’s of dollars. That door speaker can be few dollars cheap - you may get 2% more THD in a frequency band… the conversations can be really reduced down to ‘meh subjectively not noticeable’ but will save us a million. Add few of these things and now you have a shitty radio system but 5 mil in bank.

Speakers are a bit of a funny one, because, with the important condition that the amp needs to not be crap, they’re pretty straightforward to upgrade for the end user.

Yes but you make this small 5 cent change to 100 components and it adds up.

Penny wise, pound foolish

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.