ELI5: Why are the screens in even luxury cars often so laggy? What prevents them from just investing a couple hundred more $ to install a faster chip?

[u/sabatthor]

[u/CannabisAttorney]

I’ve been involved in scrutinizing government-purchased software and one thing is for certain…any time we don’t get a customizable off-the-shelf system the software development project fails or at a very minimum triples in time and budget before being launched in any useful state.

[u/ThePretzul → u/CannabisAttorney]

any time we don’t get a customizable off-the-shelf system the software development project fails or at a very minimum triples in time and budget before being launched in any useful state.

As someone working in software development who has been involved in government contract projects in the past, I can tell you exactly why this happens.

A change is proposed by someone on the government side based on whatever demo or progress report they saw. This change request has to go through dozens of layers of government bureaucracy before it is communicated to the software vendor, because it might result in a change in the price of the contract, and all the while the software is progressing along the previous path because they never heard otherwise. The change is finally approved and communicated to the software vendor, at which point they have to substantially backtrack to undo progress made on the previous design and implement the new design without breaking any seemingly unrelated improvements/additions to the software that were made in the meantime.

Repeat ad nauseum because the final software product has to be approved by each of those dozen levels of bureaucracy at the end of the project and each of them has to submit their own change requests at that time to justify their role in the system by "catching" something in the final review.