Don't take this as defending specific headcounts, but rather a response to the general idea. Modern vehicles have probably the highest inherent complexity of a

Don't take this as defending specific headcounts, but rather a response to the general idea. Modern vehicles have probably the highest inherent complexity of any thing most people regularly interact with. These are heavily regulated, safety critical electro-pneumo-mechanical distributed systems built to survive decades of severe conditions and piecemeal maintenance by the kind of people who work at jiffy lube. Every one of those attributes adds an order of magnitude to the headcount. There's simply no option to do small teams that might escape Conway's law. Sometimes I'm amazed cars work at all.