"... caused almost the entire fleet to reboot loop ..."
I am not interested in being part of someone's fleet. The fact that they use this language at all to describe an end-user who has purchased an automobile suggests that their expectations and my own - of what it means to purchase and operate a car - are in deeply (possibly dangerously) mis-aligned.
Source: Father worked in car industry. All of my neighbors, too. Pretty much everyone I knew and then, eventually, me... albeit tangentially.
I am aware of that and I hear that terminology used by rental car companies and equipment dealers, etc.
My objection is to what I hear as a subtle difference - the post-sale automobile to a private, end-user is still referred to as belonging to their fleet - as if one's ownership and use of the car were a minor detail.
I dislike this subtle shift in language and attitude.
It's the language used by the rest of the industry including manufacturers, not just private owners.
If you buy a Tesla, you will not be able to control access to it without limiting its normal set of features.
If you buy a normal bicycle, you always have full direct control of it. No software updates, no data uploading, no tracking.
Normally fleet is reserved to meaning ownership in the management sense, not the micromanagement sense. Even a Navy fleet has autonomy within. Not so with Tesla software by default.
This could be rms territory. Free vs non-free, or even Airbus vs Boeing, etc.
And I think it's fair for the engineers that have responsibility to have an internal sense of partial ownership.
As long as they still have responsibilities, they also have partial ownership.
So, if you have a car manufactured any time in the last 25 years, you're running software that hasn't likely been patched in years, has a ton of unknown defects and bugs, and might kill you if you hit an edge case that wasn't tested before it was shipped to you.
I much prefer Tesla's ability to fix software defects remotely than driving a defective piece of software. For example, I had a 2009 Hyundai Genesis that worked great until I had about 75,000 miles on it, then it mysteriously started losing engine power and I had the entire computer reboot a couple times while I was driving. Imagine your entire instrument cluster going dark and losing engine, braking, and steering power while you're traveling 75 mph on the freeway. The Hyundai dealership said the only way I could get a software/firmware upgrade was by purchasing a $500 maps DVD and having them update my system manually, which takes several hours, for which I'd have to pay one of their trained technicians to do it. Fuck them.
I vowed after that to never buy a car again that can't receive OTA updates. Would you buy a smart phone that can never get security fixes or updates? Given the tech in our cars now, why would you buy a car that wouldn't either?
So what do I do instead? I mostly cycle and ride where motorists don't drive and set the largest possible safety margins. I recognise this is not immediately practical for everyone but I'm fortunately set up in the right place with the right knowledge to achieve this.
So far this year, I've been in a car four times, a train twice and a plane twice. Musk is pushing for a world where everyone is dependent upon a form of low-occupancy heavy motorised transportation (including wanting to reinvent the train). Naturally, I recoil at this and so should more. More cars will never save the world.