You actually can mass produce tons of stuff with trade secrets! A lot of systems aren't easy to access and wouldn't necessarily be debuggable with normal tools,

You actually can mass produce tons of stuff with trade secrets! A lot of systems aren't easy to access and wouldn't necessarily be debuggable with normal tools, depending on th age of the car. For new cars, they are work on basically building devices with no interface except the communication channel, and to access it you'd have to reverse engineer the protocol, which is not trivial I can assure you. For infotainment, its not actually as easy as you think. Its definitely rated QM or maybe ASIL-A because it can do things like control climate or on some cars put it into different modes. Failures in these systems might not be catastrophic, but they need to be correct to some degree and failure or poor design, can lead to this https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-r... Granted, should they have connected everything the way they did? No, but car companies are barely engineering firms, they are just basically assembly firms that contract out all their components except for things like the ECUs. If they don't know how to specify security requirements to a vendor, it won't happen. They are learning though and it takes time.