> "No industry is pulled down more by the burden of the past than the automotive industry. Also, no industry is slower at adapting its practices — design, manufacturing, marketing. The main reasons are an ossified culture and the amount of capital required to launch a new model"
I think this is fair, but incomplete. (Disclaimer, I work for General Motors, these are my opinions alone).
It is hard to make things work. It is harder to make things work consistently. It is even harder to make things that will work consistently when you don't have control of the thing and users can use and abuse it in unforeseen ways.
Everyone who has spent more than a little time in a car has something they can complain about, regardless of the brand. Now think about how many parts are implicated in that defect. Now think about how many parts are in a car. A very very small number of defective or under-designed or mis-designed parts can lead to a bad experience.
Think about testing. Many people on HN are programmers or otherwise involved in software development. Think about writing tests for your code. How many end-to-end integration tests do you have? How many unit tests? What happens when you change platforms or update middleware? Tests in the real world are EXPENSIVE! When you test a new car, you're not testing 1 cheap part from a run of 1,000,000 parts; you're testing 1 expensive prototype part from a run of 10 parts.
The article touches on the dealership experience. For legacy automakers, there are laws in place that prevent them from ditching their dealers.
Legacy automakers also have agreements with labor unions. Adopting new work processes takes patience and understanding in the best of times. Re-arranging work can quickly become confrontational and not collaborative.
The other major partner for OEMs are suppliers. Suppliers do much of the design work, based on specifications from OEMs. Suppliers can sell the same or substantially similar parts, made from the same sub-components to many different OEMs; but the further down the sub-component tree you go, the smaller the profits. Also, if you want to do something crazy like ditch CANbus or upgrade your 12 volt architecture to 48 volts, you'll have to do a lot of work with your supplier base.
Cars aren't judged on the things that work well, they're judged by the things that don't. The car design and manufacturing process is all about limiting and eliminating those things. Uncontrolled changes can cause a huge spill of defects.
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Edit: My main point here is that, Yes, the industry is ossified and slow moving, but you can't just speed up. You have to address the reasons why it is slow moving, and you have to do it WITHOUT RUNNING OUT OF MONEY!