I believe on Teslas you can outright remove the SIM that provides internet, and the car would function mostly fine. Used model 3s are in the sub $20k range now.
A friend of mine had his Tesla's radio/modem/whatever chip die, so his internet connectivity stuff didn't work. He told me that most things continued to work just fine and he continued to drive it for a few days while waiting for his repair appointment.
So... add a "friend of a friend" confirmation to that.
Does tesla even have a procedure to install such updates without Ota?
Are you sure? Most (all?) newish cars that I know of phone home whether or not you have user-facing internet connectivity.
From what I remember:
- It came with free charging through Electricity America(?), so she has been trying to use it. They are often full or broken. The app doesn’t work. She ends up having to call support to get charging started, because the app issues. And the overall process takes 2+ hours. She wants to use the free charging on principle, but it’s becoming too much of a burden, so she started to charge at home on the normal 110 power, it just takes forever, so it won’t work with a longer commute.
- The range, especially in the winter, is much below the stated range. When factoring in the need to wait hours to charge, she said her effective range before getting a lot of range anxiety is around 100 miles or less.
- I think she also mentioned some issues they required the dealer, and getting the run around.
There was probably more, it was a long convo all about it. Some of the issues were specific to charging at our office, which is irrelevant here. She seemed pretty unhappy, but was trying to make the best of it since she already had the car. I think the biggest issues was the half baked charging infrastructure and the apps to authorize the charging. Apparently credit cards can be used, like at a gas station, but then it’s not free.