I don't think that is true at all. They even tried to create a separate company, just to focus on software, so that culture there could develop differently. It just didn't work out.
It's the classic mistake: you setup a separate 'startup style' company to move fast, but give them too much budget and too much rules, so they just spend the budget on rebuilding the same mess instead of innovation. It's a consultant heaven to make a lot of money, but in the end this really only works if the group company stays in the dark for a considerable amount of time and doesn't impose their ideas
This is an attempt to sidestep the politically hairy problem of changing a company’s culture. This never works because the daughter company either gets eaten by the more powerful parent company‘s culture, or their output is ignored and never integrated back into the parent.
I think the chances are slim, considering the general ineptitude regarding software development in German companies. They will get better until finally arriving at mediocre, but they will never be as great as American companies.
I hope one day they manage to implement a functioning CarPlay in their VW Polos, it has been broken since years.
Are there no auto manufacturers with ok software? Presumably it's not impossible.
The only in house auto software people don't seem to completely hate is Tesla.
These leadership people carry over the whole process and cultural mess into the new place while claiming to be "startup culture". Secondly, one major issue that frequently occurs but goes unnoticed is that, the pay is abysmal.
Basically, the leadership expect to hire talents for the same pay(or sometimes less) of what is paid in core group but forget that core group gets plenty other benefits(union benefits are immense things, educational budgets, pursue some other stuff for a while and then come back anytime to take up where you left off, family benefits, discounts, profit sharing etc.) and get confused when people obviously don't want to work for that kind of pay minus all the benefits.
So eventually, they hire a lot of expensive consultants, who create lot of busywork to induce artificial lack of manpower to hire more of them. Eventually, a lot of budget is spent, only thing left to show are a lot of irrelevant proof of concepts. Then core group finance people comes asking for massive budget cuts, when all of these consultants leave(with any domain knowledge) and suddenly a small firefighter internal people have to start cleaning up the mess and work long hours. Thanks to good social benefits, most people internally get frustrated due to such bad conditions and leave and then eventually the company folds.
Sadly, it is mostly a repeat playbook of big names and I have seen it happen three times already. I don't blame the consultant firms as it is not their fault to make as much billing as possible because they know there will be budget cut anytime. I don't blame internal people leaving because, they are never paid fairly, subjected to very bad conditions and they are free to leave and care about their wellbeing.
I kid you not, one of the failed project had only 1/7th of actual engineers building the software(and partially hardware), 4/7th were mostly leadership and management and rest 2/7th mostly HR, finance, regulation, legal, supply chain etc. And out of that 1/7th, only 10% were inhouse engineers, rest were expensive rented consultants, who were mostly busy doing politics.
The other two were slightly healthy ratio but managed to burn out the hardworking people by not understanding the actual requirements and introducing 200 steps of red-tape on everything.