Volkswagen, a software proprietor and car manufacturer famous for exploiting a diesel testing regime and selling environmentally harmful cars that wouldn't have otherwise passed the relevant tests, is telling corporate media that they want to unify car OSes. The harm those cars posed didn't just adversely affect the cars ostensible owners, but anyone who breathed the air around the vehicles as well. Why does VW want this? Because "roughly eight different electronic architectures" is considered too many. Volkswagen were able to get away with their deceit to the extent that they did because the software they used was proprietary. This is yet another example of how proprietary software is often malware. Proprietary software (Non-free, user-subjugating software) is not subject to inspection, sharing, and improvement by car owners (making one question whether they truly own the car at all).
Yet here whether they can "compete against QNX" is a leading point of rebuttal?
With software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, modify, and share published computer software) we can make our cars our own, comply with relevant standards and laws, and do so in a way that can be meaningfully inspected, altered, and shared. A car that runs on free software is a selling point for that car. Freeing the source code to the deceitful diesel cars should have been done when the deceit was discovered and made the subject of litigation, but apparently that was not made a condition of punishment for VW.
Software freedom would let us determine what we want to compete with, and more importantly, determine if such competition is worth considering in the first place.