Automotive engineering is antediluvian wrt process compared to software engineering.<p>We can manufacture billions of copies of our product with error rates that are almost too small to measure. Six sigma? Hah!<p>Our design processes are far in advance of the automotive industry. Continuous design is normal practice. It&#x27;s only the most careful (or most backward) shops that&#x27;ll take months to update a design.<p>The automotive industry, by comparison, regularly takes years to update a design even by a minor version. The best shops at this i.e. the F1 race teams can fix bugs in days, minor releases in months and, if this season is anything to go by, struggle horribly with major version upgrades.<p>TL;DR it&#x27;s fallacious to compare manufacturing to programming. The latter is a design process even if it feels superficially like an assembly line sometimes.<p>One final point. I would have very much liked to have read an analysis regarding the different approaches of the engineers vs the craftsman. This is an interesting topic and does have crossover between disciplines. Oh well...