Bang!
Mr. Ganssle goes on to calculate the cost of high-quality safety-critical code and compare it with what Toyota's paid out in just the DOJ settlement.
His conclusion? Toyota spent $1200 per line on fines and legal costs for this settlement alone, when the highest-quality commercial code might have cost $80 per line.
"Take your pick: $1200+++/LOC for crappy code, or $80-- for world-class."
You could probably at least triple that if you add in the costs of the original system design and coding, the recalls, the BOS retrofit, the economic losses class action, all the wrongful death/personal injury cases, and the almost inevitable secret code re-writing. Let's make it a round number- an estimated $8000 per line, and perhaps that does not include the zillions Toyota has to pay its lawyers.
So Toyota's Big Mistake was to pay 100 times what they should have paid for an "auto part."