It is a terrific salespitch, especially in how it raises the subject of OTA updates while adroitly waltzing you past the obvious worry that a poorly tested OTA update will brick your car.
There have long been techniques for writing software as formal proofs of correctness. As far as I can tell, they haven't been popular with mainstream programmers because they are simply too different.
and they'll update it when they service the car. how is that software any safer than the OTA?
its not.
It's easier to test one change in isolation than to try to figure out which of these 20/200/2000 commits broke things.
OTOH I'd risk a bad OTA update 1% of the time if it meant avoiding the service center the other 99% of the time. And I'm sure a bad update is just a call and a tow away from a fix at a Tesla service center. Unless you're on a road-trip I guess.
(BTW, do Teslas apply OTA updates while the car is underway, or store them up for application when parked? If the former, then applying even a correct update to a car in motion could have all sorts of nasty consequences if it resulted in a sudden change to, say, response characteristics of the suspension or brakes.)
But I was responding to a claim of the update being "poorly tested", not insecure. That's orthogonal to it being over the air. A poorly tested update delivered through a service center can also brick your car.
Even your cellphone doesn't update when it's 'under way', what makes you wonder a moving automobile will? If you hazard a guess as to how OTA's are applied to automobiles, I would guess it'll be in Parked, plugged in, and prompted to update by pressing an "Accept & Update" button.
We keep forgetting that lots of "advanced" features were actually invented decades ago.
Furthermore, the message tells you it won't install unless the car is plugged in or has a certain level of charge.
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-autos-303-dea...
This is possibly true (though I'd be surprised if they didn't have serious precautions in place to prevent a total firmware brick, even fairly cheap electronics are difficult to really brick these days, with multistage/multipartition bootloaders and such).
However, given the amazingly large amount of costly meatspace work they would cause themselves by sending out an OTA that bricks cars, I'm sure they are well motivated to avoid that possibility.
It should be possible now to have a rollback function built into engine controllers.
We trust the manufacturer to correctly service our cars, manually or OTA.
If you are trying to make an argument about control then make it and maybe give us some more information than just the conclusion of your thoughts.
Of course Tesla would still supply a standard UI that the vast majority of people would use, but it could be forked on Github if you preferred. (I assume that third-party apps would be separated.)
For all the 'speculation' about Apple merging with Tesla, acquiring a significant portion of Blackberry/QNX would be a better choice. Detroit could end up buying their interactivity from a subsidiary of Tesla.
Just what my car is missing, fifty thousand anime ringtones and a SNES emulator with all-you-can-eat ROMs.