Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects. With hard work and expertise, basically any old vehicle could be restored and operated: On YouTube, you can watch a man drive a 1931 Alvis to McDonald’s. But the car itself was stuck in time. If the automaker added a feature to the following year’s model, you just didn’t get it. Things have changed. My Model 3 has few dials or buttons; nearly every feature is routed through the giant central touch screen. It’s not just Tesla: Many new cars—and especially electric cars—are now stuffed with software, receiving over-the-air updates to fix bugs, tweak performance, or add new functionality.
In other words, your car is a lot like an iPhone (so much so that in the auto industry, describing EVs as “smartphones on wheels” has become a go-to cliché.) This has plenty of advantages—the improved navigation, the fart noises—but it also means that your car may become worse because the software is outdated, not because the parts break. Even top-of-the-line phones are destined to become obsolete—still able to perform the basic functions like phone calls and texts, but stuck with an old operating system and failing apps. The same struggle is now coming for cars.
Software-dependent cars are still new enough that it’s unclear how they will age. “It’s becoming the ethos of the industry that everyone’s promising a continually evolving car, and we don’t yet know how they’re going to pull that off,” Sean Tucker, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book, told me. “Cars last longer than technology does.” The problem with cars as smartphones on wheels is that these two machines live and die on very different timescales. Many Americans trade in their phone every year and less than 30 percent keep an iPhone for longer than three years, but the average car on the road is nearly 13 years old. (Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment about how its cars age.)
The writer owns a tesla.
All communication disregarded.Thank you for saving me the click. 🤝
Why, though?
We don’t know why people buy teslas yet.
Because Teslas have dogshit reliability and all have OTA updates, whereas other brands don’t suffer from these issues.
Maybe it’s not enough for them to buy a new car? I mean it’s 6 years old; I’m pretty sure Tesla was the only player in the EV scene back then.
That’s when I bought mine, and it was either get a Model 3 with ~270 miles of range or a Nissan Leaf or a tiny BMW iQ, both with like 80.
For the record, if the software updates stopped where they’re at today, I’d be fine with how the car functions until the end of its life. In fact, I kinda wish they’d just leave things alone at this point because I don’t want any extra features out of the thing.
I have a 2017 Leaf. It absolutely has its drawbacks compared to most modern cars, but it did exist 6 years ago.
Isnt this all cars and not just evs?
yeah, you can’t really buy a car that doesn’t have mobile data for “telemetry” (your driving data is sold to insurance companies)
even base trims get some phone app stuff, meaning there’s the ability to execute commands on the car. so, if they really wanted, there’s nothing stopping automakers from bricking your car, gas or EV, because they feel like it.
yipee…
I think what is being implied is EVs will have planned obsolescence even if they are perfectly working fine, like smartphones. Whether it be irreplaceable batteries, or software updates not being backward compatible. Regular cars are capable of lasting until they literally break down and die.
Regular cars have been increasingly slaved to the on-board computer since the 1990s though.
You can only buy a few modern cars that don’t send constant telemetry back to the manufacturer, for example — just like televisions.
There’s different levels of computerized control though. Would fuel injection and other modern efficiency and safety systems be possible without a main computer? I wouldn’t trade my days with simple mechanical cars and carburetors from the learning experience, but I also wouldn’t go back if I had a choice.
The line crossed was being connected to work, not computers themselves. I agree that the modern car market is a minefield in whether or not there’s anything you could get that isn’t dependent in some way on being online. Buy used, there’s still stuff out there that will give long life, has been tested by the first owners, and doesn’t have the manufacturer’s grip on it.
No batteries are irreplaceable. It would be really stupid to do that because then the OEM would have to throw away the entire vehicle when there was any sort of battery issue. Software updates have nothing to do with the powertrain. It’s not an EV problem.
Cars in general have rigorous software testing that means the last update will run fine indefinitely, and most of the updates only change nice to have features, not core operations like the engine and drive train.
EVs are pushing the envelope by having some software updates that directly change how the battery and drive train work. Tesla is the one I hear going completely in on subpar testing for updates to critical components. I don’t know if other manufacturers are doing nearly as much as Tesla is, so it might even be a Tesla problem more than an EV problem at this point, but as time goes on others will become more bold with increasing numbers of updates and lazier testing because it worked out for Tesla’s market share.
An EV that doesn’t have constant software updates can easily exist, and they should work fine until the frame falls apart. I think a portion of the EV market falls into that category, but don’t really know for certain.
Over bloan. Software does not age but security does. Other things that do not age well is specialty tech hardware components. Batteries are a question too.
I know my volt at 10 years does not have a viable oem battery replacement (back ordered and nutty price). I can get a reasonable after market battery though.
A) Your car is not an EV. It’s a Hybrid.
B) All hybrid cars were/are bad investments.
You take a car, make it more complicated by adding an entire second power and drive system, and then expect it to not cost a fortune to maintain later?
Fucking stupidity.
All cars period are bad investments. That’s being said, I had a volt for about 3 years and I saved more in gas than I lost to depreciation and expensive maintenance. I bought it before there was an EV that could do my daily commute that wasn’t horrendously expensive; they were a good transition vehicle 10 years ago before batteries and charging speeds improved, though they’re definitely a huge PITA to maintain.
If you’ve only had it three years, the expensive maintenance part hasn’t started yet, it’s probably still under warranty.
Had a volt, I don’t even think they were selling them 3 years ago. I had a 2011 or 2012, one of the original models before the update, from from 2019-2022 or thereabouts. Had to replace the radiator, 12 volt battery, reset the traction battery, and replace the coolant system hoses. Again, huge PITA but got more than double the MPG of the 2001 sedan it replaced and held its value decently.
