The Automotive engineering culture is very much an optimising one - constantly squeezing to reduce R&D lead times and engineering costs to somewhere just below

The Automotive engineering culture is very much an optimising one - constantly squeezing to reduce R&D lead times and engineering costs to somewhere just below the bare minimum. This works fine when it is balanced by objective measures of quality, so you know when the job is done and when you are being lied to, but as complexity increases, so the risk of operational ignorance and plain-old self-deception proliferate. The more complex the system, the greater the reliance upon the integrity and professional ethics of the engineers working on it, and on the correct functioning and sophistication of the checks-and-balances within the organisation.