Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects. With hard work and expertise, basically any old vehicle could be restored and operated: On YouTube, you can watch a man drive a 1931 Alvis to McDonald’s. But the car itself was stuck in time. If the automaker added a feature to the following year’s model, you just didn’t get it. Things have changed. My Model 3 has few dials or buttons; nearly every feature is routed through the giant central touch screen. It’s not just Tesla: Many new cars—and especially electric cars—are now stuffed with software, receiving over-the-air updates to fix bugs, tweak performance, or add new functionality.
In other words, your car is a lot like an iPhone (so much so that in the auto industry, describing EVs as “smartphones on wheels” has become a go-to cliché.) This has plenty of advantages—the improved navigation, the fart noises—but it also means that your car may become worse because the software is outdated, not because the parts break. Even top-of-the-line phones are destined to become obsolete—still able to perform the basic functions like phone calls and texts, but stuck with an old operating system and failing apps. The same struggle is now coming for cars.
Software-dependent cars are still new enough that it’s unclear how they will age. “It’s becoming the ethos of the industry that everyone’s promising a continually evolving car, and we don’t yet know how they’re going to pull that off,” Sean Tucker, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book, told me. “Cars last longer than technology does.” The problem with cars as smartphones on wheels is that these two machines live and die on very different timescales. Many Americans trade in their phone every year and less than 30 percent keep an iPhone for longer than three years, but the average car on the road is nearly 13 years old. (Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment about how its cars age.)
Bullshit article. Absolutely nothing about these problems is unique to EVs.
Indeed. It’s probably more that increasingly more commodities are becoming “smart”, including, but not limited to EVs. I think the reason people are specifically noticing or talking about the “ensmartification” of EVs is because cars are so vastly much more expensive than any other “smart” commodity that, and for most people, an investment of that size needs to be something you can either rely on working for X number of years, or at the very least insure yourself against that happening. But a gadget that can be turned hostile to you, at the drop of a single auto-update, is anything but reliable or dependable - and to my knowledge, becoming enshittified represents a “special” kind of broken, that you can’t insure yourself against.
Again. None of this is unique to EVs. Cars with internal combustion engines are at least equally as enshittified. At LEAST.
Yeah its whole thing is that software gets outdated but like …?
A) The latest ICE vehicles are equally tech’d out the wazoo, infotainment is 1:1 and mechanically they’ve even phased out gear shifters for ones completely controlled by electronics.
B) Software doesn’t just stop working, it’s hardware that becomes obsolete. Windows XP still runs the same as it ever did on the right hardware. There are servers around from the 90s that are still running software written in programming languages that don’t exist anymore. If you always run the same software on the same hardware (as you do in automotive; most vehicles don’t require more than 1-2 OTA updates per year, purely for bug fixes, and each one has a unique build specifically made for its hardware) there’s no reason the two should ever lose compatibility.
C) Reliability is a major factor, taken into account by OEMs, that isn’t nearly as high stakes for other tech sectors. An $800 phone dies in a few years, so what, the buyer has most likely already moved on to the next generation. A $35K car dies in a few years, you’ve probably lost a good number of buyers for life and definitely screwed them over in terms of resale value. Phone OS crashes, whatever, just restart it. Automotive software fails, well people’s lives could very easily be in jeopardy.
It’s not the modular, one-size-fits-all, update-till-the-hardware-fails, move-fast-break-things approach taken in lower-stakes computing. To liken it to a smartphone is completely ridiculous.
A) This. We should stop making this a EV thing. It’s a modern car thing. Electric drivetrain in its essence, is a simple and reliable technology. Its everything else surrounding it thats the issue.
As if Jeep has figured out how to make a transmission last as long as the warranty. EVs are full of stupid gadgetry to design in obsolescence, because the industry knows from GM Trolley buses and the EV1 these vehicles last a lot longer.
ICE cars are full of the same gadgetry, so once again this has fuck all to do with EVs.