It seems there is more backstory here that is missing from the article. Maybe a better question is, why don't all the auto companies, which already cooperate and "collude" on a lot of things, have similar licenses? There are little niche markets for modifying the software in cars, they even make movies about it. If there is some sort of financial protection to the manufacturer, I'd think they'd do similar things for certain cars, perhaps the ones that don't have performance enthusiasts, like minivans or something. I can think of some very real reasons where a company like Ford or Toyota would like to make sure you only use "sanctioned parts" for repairs and DRM could help them to verify that other parts aren't usable; they don't seem to be doing that though.

I'm just guessing here, but I know Deere produces some fairly sophisticated software that takes over head photos of crops and they have various services that offer advice on how to best farm different parts of a farmer's land. Some of that software interacts with their farm equipment (like it can signal the onboard software to maybe work more slowly in particularly dense parts of a crop and stuff like that.) I could see them trying to somehow protect that software investment and treat it as a lock-in where the device owners may want to use that service with other brands of equipment or something. From what I gather, it's a non-trivial amount of software that they've built that has some significant value.