I work in the Auto industry, and yep, the amount of code in a typical car is enormous.
Just do a simple, back of a envelope style calculation. A typical car has about 25 electronic modules, ranging from simple seat beat controllers and complex controllers like engine management units and instrument clusters. Assuming that each modules have about 250K line of code, that would take it up to 6.25M line of code. That goes up if we start to consider high end cars like BMWs and Mercs.
Let's not forget about the development infrastructure around the code development, that is another story..
I don't believe that for a minute. It sounds like they've added up every single line of code that goes into a Ford, kernel and all, and compared it with the frontend code for Facebook (~9M lines?). Given that we don't actually have acces to either number I'm calling bullshit on this one. It's how you present your data when you have something to hide.
"Ford’s 2005 models contain between two and three million lines of code. Current 2007/2008 vehicles have an average of six million lines of code. The company is expecting about 10 million lines of code in its vehicles in 2010."
http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_sg/about_us/success...
Although it's an unfair comparison if you're counting all the dozens of subsystems in the car, mostly developed by third parties, but not counting the OS kernel, full MySQL source, libraries, etc. used by Facebook & Twitter.
If this is true, it's evidence that Ford can't hire software engineers.