Yeah, the software methodology at car companies makes a lot of the seat-of-the-pants just-ship-it stuff that HNers are used to look like kindergarten.
The car companies know how to do this. Maybe they messed up in this case (I'm skeptical of the article), but it's not because they don't know software.
The transcript is very enlightening. It was extremely clear that on this particular project, the software development process was a total trainwreck. No one who was familiar with the SW dev literature had technical leadership and authority over the codebase. As a matter of fact, the transcript is so shocking it could be used as a manual of antipatterns for SW development both in embedded and out of embedded. A friend and I (we used to both work at an embedded systems company) spent an evening going over the transcript and mocking the errors. :-) By and large, the errors were of the design form. E.g., too much work on the critical threads. Not separating brake and acceleration threads. Four thousand globals. I think the cyclomatic complexity was something like > 1000 for the control path function. Etc.
One of the remarks is actually that Toyota had taken some lessons learned from the time the codebase was developed and had been working on improving since then. So that's good.
The car companies know how to do this. Maybe they messed up in this case (I'm skeptical of the article), but it's not because they don't know software.