I think we're at something like 235 millions cars on the road today with QNX inside. The volume blows my mind. We're also hiding inside lots of healthcare products, industrial control systems, etc.

There's lots of interesting key differences between something based on Linux, for example, and QNX. Worth digging into if you're interested in these things. My colleague wrote a short ebook and the intro has a good summary: https://gitlab.com/elahav/qnx-rpi-book/-/tree/master/pdf

> They are the brains of a ton of cars on the market, like all Ford cars. Used for complex calculations like automatic transmissions.

I would seriously doubt that QNX or anything like it resembling a "real OS" is running on the automatic transmission. If the transmission controller is running any OS at all it's likely a microcontroller running a much more specialized RTOS.

QNX is very common in automotive applications, but in things like digital instrument clusters and ADAS where the software is complex enough to benefit from a full networkable OS with support for a lot of different high speed buses but the use case still needs real-time guarantees and/or microkernel stability. I've specifically seen QNX's hypervisor marketed for digital clusters where the critical data display and interaction with the ECU could happen within a fully certified QNX environment that would be designed to be as stable and reliable as possible while allowing infotainment applications to run in a VM instance of Android, Linux, or even more QNX where software reliability was less critical. If it crashes, the important instruments are still working.

Ford's "Sync 3" and "Sync 4/4A" infotainment systems run on QNX as well, though being just infotainment they didn't really care about the realtime aspect (though I'm sure stability was a big thing compared to their Windows CE based predecessors). They've moved to Android for their latest revision.

QNX was the OS behind the ICON computer that was used in schools across Ontario in the mid-80’s. At the time, I thought they were pretty cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_(microcomputer)

Subaru runs WinCE, or still did ten years ago anyways. Hopefully they cutover to something else someday!

Does this mean it's good or bad? These companies aren't exactly the beacons of innovation.