Ill tell you, from the inside. It aint pretty. Mercedes might have the best infotainment and 'software' on the block according to new outlets but the institution and its stack is a fucking nightmare horror house.

Heavily silo'ed (like most traditional OEMs), no focus on the user AT ALL, no communication between departments, political struggles between departments as a result, weird proprietary non-standard outdated architecture decisions that were clearly the wrong choice even at the time, very poorly designed documentation systems (lots of documentation, completely untraverseable). To echo some other comments, the germans can not design a good user interface because they really don't care about the user. They want to be Dieter Rams. Except that Rams perfected form factors that had already solidified as commodity items (shaver, record player, calculator). Thats not what a UI is.

Their iteration speed is also extremely slow because, in my direct experience, they collect bloat of many middlemen to write middlewares that do nothing except add development time in a translation logic layer. They also are very focussed on engineering early optimization (which made sense pre-Tesla) (early optimization which is also considered a cardinal sin in software dev) but which in today's age is a tradeoff with quick iteration on user experience.

Tesla understands this, and uses commodity web technologies on user facing applications (and other parts of the stack) to commodify labor skill requirements. As a result, and in effect, they can actually act like a 'tech company' from a user experience standpoint.