I think cars are a poor example. Cheaping out on quality can cost companies 6 years of 12 developers' salaries, market share, reputation, customers and bankrupt

I think cars are a poor example. Cheaping out on quality can cost companies 6 years of 12 developers' salaries, market share, reputation, customers and bankruptcy procedures instead of... 3 years of 9 developers' salaries. I've seen it firsthand: Major update to our only software product. Years of work. Everything is moving too slow. Managers hire more people. Performance tanks due to training the new folks. Our publicly available software is abandonware, all hands on the major update to get it done. A few customers switch to competitors, but hype is high for the new update. After 5 total rewrites, they cut their losses and launch the half-baked current iteration. Launch feels earth shatteringly disappointing and insulting to all stakeholders, even including the developers of the major update. Developers receive death threats. Many developers leave the company. Remaining customers flee to competitors. Lessons learned: Don't cheap out on quality. It can quite literally cost you your company. Nobody needs absolute quality, and that's impossible to achieve, but at least try to care about quality.