One of the nice things about Tesla is their regular, free software updates.
Regular, free software updates are nice as long as the regular, free software updates are nice.
As soon as whoever controls the software updates decides to do something not nice, however, those updates become a huge liability. It's annoying enough with things like evergreen browsers or Windows 10, all of which apparently break basic functionality all the time. But with cars, where an enforced OTA software downgrade can reduce what you bought to something less than you thought you were paying for, and you can have the original back for a few thousand bucks? That's just a legalised extortion mechanism IMNSHO, and I don't want anything to do with it.
Totally agree. However if you look at the trend Tesla has set from the start(as opposed to other mfgrs) it's been very positive.
In the same vein if you're buying a relatively new car you're going to have an unknown amount of reliability based on new changes to that model year. How the company deals with that down the road is a similar issue. I remember looking into a Hyundai a long time ago only to find out that they were denying warranty repairs on clutches with ~4k miles that hadn't been abused but were failing.
However if you look at the trend Tesla has set from the start(as opposed to other mfgrs) it's been very positive.
Interesting. I'm curious about how Tesla will do given their very different commercial and technological models. However, I've never driven one, and the anecdotal comments about them that I've noticed have given me an overwhelmingly negative impression of their brand. Maybe what I've seen so far was just unfortunate and not a fair representation?
Regular, free software updates are nice as long as the regular, free software updates are nice.
As soon as whoever controls the software updates decides to do something not nice, however, those updates become a huge liability. It's annoying enough with things like evergreen browsers or Windows 10, all of which apparently break basic functionality all the time. But with cars, where an enforced OTA software downgrade can reduce what you bought to something less than you thought you were paying for, and you can have the original back for a few thousand bucks? That's just a legalised extortion mechanism IMNSHO, and I don't want anything to do with it.