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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>I also have a severe dislike of the Tesla updating process.

There being an "updating process" is already a huge red flag for a car.

Cars have had computers for decades now. Before the age of OTA updates, whenever one of those computers had a problem, a recall was issued and you needed to physically take the car to a dealer, probably pay some kind of service fee, and have them plug something into a hidden slot somewhere to flash an update. Other times they'd just swap out the physical computer (call it a "part") and throw out the buggy one.

I don't like the modern 'car OS as a service' system where every month or so defects need to be fixed for some reason, but OTA is a hell of a lot better than the system before software updates became available to consumers.

That’s simply untrue. The old way was definitely better because, with OTA, the manufacturers will succumb to the usual web-software bullshit of “we don’t have to sell them something that actually works now, we’ll just push the update later”. I mean, it’s a car, I can easily take it to a garage and do so for anything else that might be wrong (if I can’t fix it myself) so I don’t see the problem in doing so for software patches. OTA doesn’t solve many issues for me but it sure as hell will create new ones.

Better than shitty software that, say, has serious issues with stuff as simple as connecting a phone via Bluetooth, and can't be upgraded on your own at all, no, it has to be done at an authorised dealership.

Oh yeah that’s the other thing. The software still has multiple bugs. But in general I appreciate the updates. I just wish the update process to be (much) easier. I have sometimes been sitting an hour at the dealer at night just to download the update. Feels like a massive waste of time IMO. I bought the car so that it can provide service for me not the other way around.

Ironically, have you tried any modern vehicle with good software? I can install updates at any point in time as long as they're downloaded through my, uh, Tesla app.

Every modern car has, at least, a media player interface. Why wouldn't you want to be able to update that software to support changes in CarPlay, modern apps, etc?

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