Now, if Tesla were to start pushing updates to older cars that made them artificially degraded or less responsive than the newer cars (as Apple is accused of doing), then that would be a worthy outrage story.
Comment on My Car Is Becoming a Brick
colournoun@beehaw.org 6 days ago
There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding by the author here, or a conflation of “no more software updates” with “continuing to get updates that your processor isn’t powerful enough for”. You may miss out on some new features, but barring equipment failure, the original software will continue to do what it did when you bought the car.
“But once software-dependent cars stop receiving updates, they will start to get worse. Maybe the navigation system starts to crash, or the Netflix app in your Tesla becomes so buggy”
No, when you stop getting updates, the car will continue to perform in the same way, again barring equipment failure. The software itself will not degrade and suddenly start to become buggy.
The reason your iPhone seems to do that is because it continues to get software updates that are made for a newer, more powerful phone. Your old iPhone 6 doesn’t play the latest graphics-intensive and high resolution games, but it performs the way it always did. And perhaps Apple pushes iOS updates that don’t perform as well on your old phone, making it seem slow. If you were to load the original iOS and the original apps of the time period, it would perform as well as it did the day you got it.
The bigger concern for me is being able to control what software is applied to my car (right to repair) so that I can keep bloated software updates out if I prefer the way it was working previously. Currently that’s not possible with Tesla.
colournoun@beehaw.org 6 days ago
fixmycode@feddit.cl 6 days ago
I think you’re overestimating how much services care about retro-compatibility of clients. Try opening a YouTube video in the iPhone 6 app, you can’t, and not because the video is now incompatible, it’s because the old app has not been updated, and YouTube changed their API, so even if the software doesn’t change, services are not being provided to it. Same will happen to the Tesla app, Navigation, Netflix, everything that relies in external services to work. Sure, the car features will probably still work, but in the case of navigation, for example, even if it uses an offline database of maps and it calculates routes directly on the car’s hardware, new versions of the maps will not be available, or, routes might not be able to be calculated.
Lyrl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
The navigation update-to-car limitations are a big reason Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are a thing. Externally provided services you have to connect to your phone for. Car features work on the car. This seems ok.