As most future automotive innovations will be realized with software, the automotive industry is facing a transition from mechanical to software engineering. To achieve successful product launches, this is also true for manufacturing engineering. This paper presents an empirical study of the interaction between the organizations for product development and manufacturing, specifically focusing on automotive software engineering. It is presented as a multiple case study with a qualitative approach where data were collected from documents and in interviews with practioners at two Swedish automotive companies. To obtain validity of the results, multiple information sources were triangulated in within-case analysis and cross-case analysis. It can be concluded that there are challenges in the research area since 18 issues emerged from the data. Furthermore, a majority of the findings were supported by data sources from both cases, which indicates a possibility to generalize the results to the automotive domain.