This doesn't surprise me. Here's my hot take, having worked building these kinds of ecosystems in automotive and related industries (RV), and also working with German automotive/caravan companies in those spaces.
1) They don't want to invest in building vehicle software ecosystems as it's expensive, time consuming, and not exactly in their wheel house. Wireless and cloud connectivity just aren't their language.
2) They don't want to work with existing proprietary off the shelf ecosystem solutions -- they feel that because it's "their vehicles" they should "own" the technology and IP. They don't want vendor lock in, so they avoid existing proprietary solutions they can't "take over". And by "take over" I mean "have the vendor give their proprietary stack to them for free, so they can then share it with their other suppliers".
3) They expect the vendor base to "partner" to develop "open" software stacks for free -- which most vendors aren't keen on doing as there is little upside for the vendor to spend their own internal NRE building a system that their competitors benefit from and can quickly undercut them on. They generally refuse to pay for the development of a stack that they can own and build upon.
The root cause seems to be magical thinking from the higher ups - "Hey connectivity stuff is everywhere, it can't be hard, why should we pay for this?"
They don't want to build it. They don't see the value in paying for it. So of course open source is the obvious solution. Hey, just have the nerds build it! They love doing that kind of work for free.
qrios
All three points are valid for every platform provider, and so for car manufactures.
1) They don't want to invest in building vehicle software ecosystems as it's expensive, time consuming, and not exactly in their wheel house. Wireless and cloud connectivity just aren't their language.
2) They don't want to work with existing proprietary off the shelf ecosystem solutions -- they feel that because it's "their vehicles" they should "own" the technology and IP. They don't want vendor lock in, so they avoid existing proprietary solutions they can't "take over". And by "take over" I mean "have the vendor give their proprietary stack to them for free, so they can then share it with their other suppliers".
3) They expect the vendor base to "partner" to develop "open" software stacks for free -- which most vendors aren't keen on doing as there is little upside for the vendor to spend their own internal NRE building a system that their competitors benefit from and can quickly undercut them on. They generally refuse to pay for the development of a stack that they can own and build upon.
The root cause seems to be magical thinking from the higher ups - "Hey connectivity stuff is everywhere, it can't be hard, why should we pay for this?"
They don't want to build it. They don't see the value in paying for it. So of course open source is the obvious solution. Hey, just have the nerds build it! They love doing that kind of work for free.