He's not talking about ECU firmware, he's talking about infotainment software. You can't use the best practices for ECU firmware development as you use for other types of software development: it would never get done! Safety-critical software running on bare-metal or an RTOS (like for ECUs, ABS controllers, avionics, etc.) isn't much like software for doing GPS mapping and other infotainment functions, and the development process is entirely different. The latter has orders of magnitude more lines of code and is far simpler in scope.

The OP is right; currently, automakers basically outsource all their infotainment software, and generally do a poor job with it, though it's getting better. Considering how much drivers now interact with these or similar systems (usually on their phones), to do things like stream music and especially navigate, automakers should be doing a better job integrating this stuff into the cockpits for ease of use and safety.

I don't agree with you. There are several tools used in the creation of ECU firmware (and writing it). The software used for detection of car on rollers or road (diesel scandal) was one such tool for example.

What the heck are you talking about? Are you responding to a different post or something? You're not addressing anything I wrote there at all, you're talking about something completely different. My main point was that you can't use the practices used for ECU firmware for other types of software (anything that uses a general-purpose OS), and it's true, it's an entirely different kind of software development.

I was not really addressing ECU programming - that is an entirely different beast. But regardless, Toyota was involved in a scandal where they tried to cover up an error in the ECU that resulted in at least one death.

A subsequent review of their ECU code was quite worrying - it was to put it mildly, a cluster fuck that would result in deaths sooner or later.