John Battelle interviews Tony Scott, CTO of GM

John Battelle interviewed Tony Scott, CTO of GM, in the July 2004 issue of Business 2.0.

When you go to a gas station now, you can stick the nozzle into the gas tank and it works. But in the early days of the auto industry, there were 2,000 car companies, nothing was standardized, and demand far exceeded supply. In that early era, you could do whatever you wanted. The tech industry has by and large been in that same mode. But that’s now changing.

Today in the typical car, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a GM or a Honda (HMC), electronics and software represent roughly about a third of the cost of the car, more than the labor or the steel. They’re the single biggest cost in a car today — and rising.